Rebooted, The Dream Lives On

Miami — Fake news and comment-thread sewers don’t scare Jimmy Wales.

Wales, the man who who conquered the World Wide Web 1.0 with a vision of citizen-powered information called Wikipedia, is back with an updated plan to protect us from from threats to a vital press, without giving up the democratic dream.

Wales described that 2.0 tweak in the final session of the ​“Knight News Forum: Strengthening Local News, Community and Democracy,” a three-day gathering at the JW Marriott Hotel in Miami of some 500 online news pioneers and charitable foundation execs.

Optimism about new experiments mixed with a sense of gloom and defeat over the conference’s three days. Speakers rued the decimation of conventional mainstream media newsrooms, the prevalence of deliberately false news stories that reach millions of people over social networks, and the collapse of public trust (especially in Red America) in fact-based news coverage.

The consensus: Democracy is in peril.

Wales, who founded Wikipedia, the crowd-sourced online encyclopedia that ranks as the world’s fifth most-read website, acknowledged those concerns. But he argued that those concerns can be met by combining the work of professional journalists and citizen contributors to create a more engaged, high-quality form of news than we had before the Internet scrambled the industry.

He’s trying to do that with a project he has launched called WIkiTribune. (Check it out here.)

“I’m a pathologist optimist,” Wales declared in a discussion moderated by Chicago Community Trust President Helene Gayle.

Wales has quietly rolled out the project over the past 10 months. He hired professional journalists to report stories (unlike on Wikipedia), arguing that the public wants and needs professionals to suss out facts and present them compellingly. He has also invited everyone else to join a ​“community” of contributors who proofread, suggest stories, and weigh in on evolving stories. They point out missing facts to resolve what’s true or solicit a journalist to find out more.

As with Wikipedia, the not-for-profit organization enforces standards: No opinion-filled rants and personal attacks. That preserves a place where ​“thoughtful people interact” based on vetted facts, he said.

It’s a charitable, reader-supported enterprise. No ads. No pay wall charging for access to stories. No clickbait; success will be measured by impact and quality, not page views. He’s not looking to replicate Buzzfeed or Huffington Post, he said. He’s not concerned about producing ​“100 million page views. If I like it and I read it, I’m happy. If other people like it, that’s great.”

A New World

In some sense, all that gloom and defeat came as a surprise at the Knight conference. Especially in light of how this conference stacked up compared with previous fix-the-media confabs.

Knight has held those conferences regularly over the past decade. It has brought together journalists from around the country whose experimental local online news projects the foundation has seeded. (Knight granted start-up money to launch the Valley Independent Sentinel in 2009 and WNHH FM in 2015. Those are sister newsrooms to the New Haven Independent (b. 2005) under the umbrella of the not-for-profit Online Journalism Project.) Professional Deep Thinkers and futurists were thrown into the mix.

Dozens of people used to attend those Knight sessions. We fit around a table. This week there was a banquet hall full of tables to fit everyone.

Hundreds of journalists who work at start-ups (and long-past start-ups) were in attendance. The field has exploded; the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) has over 100 members now. Other associations of local news sites from around the country have formed other organizations, like LION Publishers (a mix of for-profit and not-for-profit local online news sites).

Members of charitable foundations were out in force at this week’s conference, too. They came from Macon, from Boulder, from Baltimore to Cleveland to Oklahoma City and Baton Rouge, and countless points in between. When Knight started these conference, the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven was practically the only one of its ilk funding local not-for-profit journalism to help fill the gap left by shrinking corporate mainstream print newsrooms. Knight enlisted CFGNH CEO Will Ginsberg to help persuade other community foundations to follow the lead. Now dozens either have joined the pack or are seriously considering doing so.

And the election of Donald Trump convinced philanthropic donors to funnel tens of millions of dollars last year to investigative online outfits like ProPublica. Another $25 million came through in smaller batches for over 100 not-for-profits in a now annual grassroots ​“News Match” drive. Podcasts have exploded as well, enriching the narrative journalism and investigative reporting arenas with a combination of old-fashioned radio values and 21st century tech.

Sure, many experiments fail, especially those reliant on 1980s-style mainstream journalists seeking to preserve their way of reporting in a changing world. But many have thrived and sustained. So many start up every year that no one can keep track of all of them.

A decade ago, many of the earlier generation web pioneers welcomed the decline of mainstream media. We rushed to take advantage of the removal of barriers of entry to an industry that no longer required printing presses or expensive TV studios to reach the public. We celebrated the elimination of journalists as ​“gatekeepers” for information and debate. We rediscovered the reason we went into the business, to ferret out stories and connect with readers to produce the raw material, the building blocks, of democracy. We found that even when we wrote opinions, they no longer had much impact because of the flood of instant community input holding us accountable and often contributing facts or questions we hadn’t considered. So even an opinion article like this, for instance, starts a conversation; it’s not the last word. There’s no point in writing endorsements for political candidates any more, with so many readers able to contribute views so quickly and often thoughtfully. But the facts we gather are more needed than ever.

So sure, we’ve had to figure out along the way how to stop trolls and hatemongers from hijacking comment threads. (Answer: Substitute close human review for algorithms.) Despite the financial support, we are still continually hustling to raise enough money to stay in business; the philanthropic sector needs to step up to support no longer profitable local journalism (the result largely of tech changes that make it easier for advertisers to reach target customers for far less money on other platforms). Creative destruction means some sites will perish each year while others emerge. And bots and viral fake social media posts have magnified an old problem, the effect of National Enquirer-style supermarket tabloid reporting.

But this is a golden age of journalism. More experimentation, more new voices, more citizen engagement. Yes, the number of statehouse reporters has drastically dropped, and that’s a problem. But the halcyon days of yore often saw packs of reporters covering the same stories the same way. Today inspiring success stories like the online VT Digger and the Texas Tribune have seven-figure newsrooms producing top-notch daily investigative and state government reporting in new ways. Yes, regional mainstream print dailies are collapsing — the result of generations of greed by corporate owners. But smart companies have found new ways to reach more readers and tell stories in more interesting ways than ever.

It was hard at times to remember all the good news when speaker after speaker decried the collapse of an industry. It was almost like journalists dreamed for the ​“gatekeepers” to return, the self-important distant Fourth Estate that dictated to the public and set agendas, the three major TV networks that offered a circumscribed view of the country and the world within ​“acceptable” corporate barriers, the vicious local monopoly newspaper owners or greedy chains that bought their companies to maximize profit by sucking them dry.

It was a nice dream to some who enjoyed the status and power. It’s long over. Hallelujah!

Quality, Collaboration: A Business Model

Wales looked forward rather than back at his conference-closing address.

He did decry the ​“shift … from a high-trust society to a low trust-society” in press outlets like the Washington Post and New York Times (though he also noted that they have millions more readers than ever before).“We want to live in a world where we pretty much trust people because they’re trustworthy,” Wales said.

Wikipiedia did that. It trusted self-regulating communities to produce the world’s most-read evolving encyclopedia. With a surprising degree of factual accuracy.

He also spoke of learning from World Wide Web 1.0 experiments like his. He spoke of how we at first all thought, ​“This is amazing! Anyone can communicate with anyone” on the evolving web. Then came the dot-com bust and fake news and vicious hate-filled comment threads. ​“There’s a lot of junk on the internet,” Wales said. ​“That’s not what we built it for. Let’s go back to our roots and build something we’re really proud of.”

The dream of ​“citizen journalists” didn’t quite work out. It turns out citizens want to weigh in with information and commentary and press critiques. But overall they also want professional journalists to do the extensive, skilled fact-gathering to start the conversation (as opposed to end it, as in the past). Skilled journalists still matter. Rules — insisting on standards of civility and factuality — still matter.

So with WikiTribune, Wales is making sure to enforce standards, he said. But also to deal in the public at large.

The site’s slogan: ““Evidence-based journalism, fact checked by you, supported by you.”

Some lessons from Web 1.0 have laid the groundwork for higher standards in connection with new forms of reporting and (in the case of Wikipedia) trusting the majority of citizens to act as constructive collaborators in a regulated zone. It turned out that just jacking up page views through clickbait didn’t produce profit; producing ten times your former readership did not translate to holding the line on ad revenues. (The former hedge fund-owned chain that previously owned the New Haven Register went bankrupt twice trying that ​“dollars-to-dimes” approach.)

It turned out quality and engaged readers produced results. It helped the Times and Post to sign up millions of paying subscribers. ​“If the public doesn’t care, we’re lost. They clearly do care. That’s a sign,” Wales noted.

The local model is still trickier. No one ​“answer” exists for preserving and building local news organizations. But lots or promising ideas are out there, continuing to create a lab for innovation and a stronger citizen-powered democracy. Just ask the Wiki-man who invented the idea.