Wikitribune

Type of site	News
Available in	English
Headquarters	London
Owner	Jimmy Wales
Website	www.wikitribune.com
Commercial	Yes[1]
Registration	Optional
Launched	25 April 2017 (2017-04-25)
Content licence	Creative Commons Attribution[2]

WikiTribune (stylized as WikiTRIBUNE) is a planned news website in which professional journalists research and report news stories alongside volunteers who curate articles by proofreading, fact-checking, suggesting changes and adding sources. Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, announced the site in April 2017 as a for-profit site, not affiliated with Wikipedia or its support organisation, the Wikimedia Foundation.^[3][4][5]

"This will be the first time that professional journalists and citizen journalists will work side-by-side as equals writing stories as they happen, editing them live as they develop and at all times backed by a community checking and rechecking all facts", said Wales.^[6] Wales intends for the project to help fight fake news online; he was reportedly motivated to address this problem after hearing the Counselor to the U.S. president, Kellyanne Conway, use the expression "alternative facts" during an interview in January 2017.^[3][7]

Initial crowdfunding for the site was completed in May 2017. Operations are not expected to begin before September 2017.^[8]

In August 2017, Peter Bale was announced as the first editor of the site.^[9]

Business model

The venture was launched by Jimmy Wales, who is expected to have a "hands-on" role as chief executive.^[10][11]

WikiTribune is a for-profit site^[5] that will be funded by donors; the more funds they raise, the more journalists they can employ.^[12] Crowdfunding opened on 25 April 2017.^[13] Supporters are being asked to pay £10 or $15 per month,^[14] but access to the news will be free.^[13] It has been stated that having no shareholders, advertisers or subscribers will reduce commercial pressures and that paying members will be able to suggest topics.^[6] Supporters who donate to the site will also help decide which subjects the site will focus on.^[3]

Journalists will need to provide the source of a fact or provide full transcripts and recordings of interviews.^[12] The public will be able to modify and update articles; however, the update will only go live once approved by staff or trusted volunteers.^[3][12]

Staff and structure

The initial software platform for the site is planned to be a customised version of WordPress.^[15] Wales' company Jimmy Group, which he incorporated earlier in April 2017, has filed a trademark request for "WIKITRIBUNE" with the Intellectual Property Office, which was examining the request as of 25 April 2017.^[16]

People named as involved in the project as advisors to Jimmy Wales include Lily Cole, Jeff Jarvis, Guy Kawasaki, and Lawrence Lessig.^[12] Funding for seven of the ten planned journalists was secured within three weeks of the launch and they were then recruited, starting with Holly Brockwell.^[17][18] The initial target of funding for ten journalists was then achieved on the final day of the one-month crowd-funding appeal. An additional $100,000 of matching support from Craig Newmark's News Integrity Initiative was also expected.^[19]

In a Medium post published at the end of May 2017, WikiTribune announced that it had met its funding goal, but would not start operations until later that year: "Despite lots of confused comments, the end of the crowdfunding campaign doesn't mean an instantaneous launch. It means we've got enough support to start making the project happen, which involves hiring for, designing and building WikiTribune from scratch. ... We don’t have an exact date, but we're aiming to be up and running – that means producing content – by Autumn this year. We’ll do it faster if we can, but only if we can do it right."^[8]

In a Medium post published at the end of July 2017, WikiTribune introduced three out of the ten journalists they will be hiring.

• Holly Brockwell
• Harry Ridgewell
• Linh Nguyen^[20]

Reception

Adrienne LaFrance reviewed the proposal in The Atlantic. She had previously worked at the Honolulu Civil Beat, which was founded by Pierre Omidyar with similar ideas of "peer news". From this experience, she thought that the stated plan was over-ambitious as a staff of ten would be insufficient to cover global news stories and managing volunteer input would be time-consuming.^[21]

Andrew Lih, a researcher at the American University's school of communication, expected WikiTribune's hybrid approach to be more successful than the volunteer-only model of Wikinews,^[22] "You have an operational command structure that’s based on full-time staff. The pro journalists and editors provide the supervision on how the story moves forward. The crowd does the heavy lifting on a lot of the combing, sifting, searching, checking. You let the crowd do what the crowd is good at."

Sarah Baxter, the deputy editor of the Sunday Times, addressed WikiTribune in the newspaper on 30 April 2017 in an article titled "Wikipedia won't break real news, just tweak it". After critical remarks on the reliability of Wikipedia, she concluded: "It's the warp and weft of debate in the free press, whether digital or print, that gets to the heart of the truth, not the wacky wisdom of self-appointed crowds."^[23]

Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, reviewed coverage of the project four days after the initial announcement. She said that there was considerable scepticism which was apparent in an Ask Me Anything session held by Wales. She thought that WikiTribune would duplicate work which was already being done and gave examples such as David Fahrenthold's Pulitzer prize-winning coverage of the United States presidential election for the Washington Post, during which he used Twitter to engage with the public.^[24]

Zahera Harb, a lecturer in journalism at City, University of London, questioned the site's reliance on unpaid volunteers, saying, "I see a model closer to 'exploitation' than anything else." She also wrote that the site would be susceptible to error and bias: "In this system, we will encounter mistakes similar to those we have been seeing in Wikipedia. Those mistakes tend to cause the same harm as fake news. ... Meddling with Wikipedia accounts has become a tool in media wars between political and economic rivals and also between countries that are in conflict over territory or that have conflicting historical narratives."^[25]

Staff at a media law firm, Hogan Lovells, speculated whether the proposed collaborative model of journalism would provide sufficient protection against the English Defamation Act 2013 and concluded that the matter was not certain in law and so would depend upon the outcome of future court actions.^[26]

Wikitribune has been compared to CORRECT!V, a non-profit investigative journalism centre in Germany;^[14] De Correspondent, a Dutch news site financed by crowd-funding and charities;^[3] Krautreporter, German news website supported by crowd-funding;^[27] ProPublica, an investigative journalism website supported by subscription;^[28] and International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the host of the Panama Papers.^[29]

See also

• Citizen journalism
• Collaborative journalism
• Crowdsourcing
• Open-source journalism
• PediaPress
• Scientific journalism
• Wiki journalism
• Wikinews

References

External links

• Official website
• Ask Me Anything – Q&A session with Jimmy Wales on Reddit soon after the launch