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Wikipedia’s founder wants to fight fake news with a crowdfunded news site
Jimmy Wales is all about grand ideas: 16 years ago, he co-founded Wikipedia, one of the largest compendiums of information on the planet. Now, he’s out to tackle the plague of fake news on the web with a new venture called Wikitribune. Wikitribune is a global news site that will feature stories by professional journalists; their articles will be vetted and fact-checked by volunteers, and efforts will be made to ensure maximum possible transparency about the sources of information for each piece.
Good things can happen when a crowd goes to work on trying to figure out a problem in journalism. At the same time, completely crowdsourced news investigations can go bad without oversight — as when, for example, a group of Redditors falsely accused someone of being the Boston Marathon bomber. An entirely crowdsourced investigation with nobody to oversee it or pay for it will probably go nowhere. At the same time, trust in the media is low and fact-checking efforts have become entwined with partisan politics.
Jimmy Wales changed encyclopedias and news while he was at it. And now he’s at it at it again, announcing a crowdfunding campaign to start Wikitribune, a collaborative news platform with “professional journalists and community contributors working side-by-side to produce fact-checked, global news stories. The community of contributors will vet the facts, help make sure the language is factual and neutral, and will to the maximum extent possible be transparent about the source of news posting full transcripts, video, and audio of interviews.” The content will be free with monthly patrons providing as much support as possible, advertising as little as possible.
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Jimmy Wales, one of the minds behind the internet’s cheat sheet, Wikipedia, has launched a new, unaffiliated website called the WikiTribune.
On the site’s opening video message, Wales adjusts his glasses and tosses out the site’s lofty ambition: “The news is broken, but we’ve figured out how to fix it.”
For news organizations, the promise of VR has been marred by a handful of challenges that have so far made it difficult to justify wholesale investment in the technology.
That’s clear from a new report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism that takes an in-depth look at the state of VR news in 2017. The conclusion: despite some earnest early efforts among news organizations, widespread adoption of the technology among consumers is still years away.
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When talking about the future of the Huffington Post brand, editor-in-chief Lydia Polgreen points to the homepage “splash” following the news that Bill O’Reilly had been let go from Fox News.
The Huffington Post has pulled no punches with its tabloid-inspired homepage splashes.
“BILLY ON THE STREET,” its Bill O’Reilly story announced.
“HE WENT TO JARED,” another proclaimed (Jared Kushner, that is).
Here’s another, on Rep. Devin Nunes:
This @HuffingtonPost splash was made for me. pic.twitter.com/qCcd5GgO2G
— Hillary Frey (@hilella) March 29, 2017
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