Max Cutler

Today Joey Baker tweeted about a link to a blog post on the Nie­man Jour­nal­ism Lab which talks about the author’s vision of the future of dig­i­tal news cre­ation and uti­liza­tion. One of the core con­cepts was the idea that a wiki would serve as an author­i­ta­tive infor­ma­tion source, to which blog or news posts would point for back­ground while pro­vid­ing just new tid­bits of infor­ma­tion them­selves. This reminded me of Daniel Bachhuber’s post on top­i­cal wikis on the CoPress blog a few months ago. Daniel and I had had a per­sonal con­ver­sa­tion about the topic, but I’m not sure I really under­stood it at the time.

Since that talk with Daniel, I’ve been hard at work on Courant News and think­ing about the prob­lems of actual jour­nal­is­tic con­tent pro­duc­tion from the edi­to­r­ial stand­point instead of the purely tech­ni­cal stand­point with which I was more famil­iar. As a result, I think that this idea actu­ally has much more merit than I ini­tially gave it credit for, and could serve as a valu­able tool for both the news orga­ni­za­tion and its consumers.

For the news orga­ni­za­tion itself, a wiki can serve as a tool for main­tain­ing stores of infor­ma­tion on given top­ics, from which reporters can refresh their knowl­edge or learn about a new beat. Instead of rely­ing on a con­stant rehash­ing of the his­tory of a given sub­ject in arti­cles, a wiki can main­tain a per­sis­tent record and be updated with new infor­ma­tion to main­tain a con­sis­tent infor­ma­tion source over time. By tying that in with tagged con­tent, as Daniel sug­gests, such wiki pages can be use­ful tools for research and explo­ration in addi­tion to purely doc­u­men­tary purposes.

Sim­i­lar argu­ments can be extended to the news con­sumers as well. Instead of rely­ing on search func­tion­al­ity to find out more his­tory or related infor­ma­tion about the con­tents of an arti­cle or an arbi­trary sub­ject, a con­sumer can look at the com­pre­hen­sive wiki. I can’t count how many times I have gone to Wikipedia to look up infor­ma­tion on all sorts of ran­dom top­ics. Hav­ing a wiki run and/or pro­duced by a news orga­ni­za­tion allows for it to be more in-depth –and poten­tially more cred­i­ble– than a general-purpose wiki like Wikipedia.

I’m not sure it nec­es­sar­ily makes sense to allow such news wikis to be editable by any­one and every­one, but the news orga­ni­za­tion does not have to be the sole provider of authors either. Daniel’s exam­ple of allow­ing a stu­dent gov­ern­ment to main­tain its own wiki entry is a good exam­ple of a case where a news orga­ni­za­tion could allow an out­side indi­vid­ual or group to main­tain a page about them­selves or a given sub­ject. This may not be exclu­sive author­ship rights, as the news orga­ni­za­tion may want to retain the abil­ity to add new and edit exist­ing con­tent pro­vided by such out­side sources, but select part­ner­ships would prove ben­e­fi­cial for every­one (news org, out­side source, and consumers).

I would be sur­prised if many news orga­ni­za­tions do not already have some inter­nal data­base of sorts, and I think there is a lot of value in open­ing them up and estab­lish­ing news wikis. Doing so pro­vides another rea­son for con­sumers to visit their web­sites and stick around, thereby increas­ing traf­fic and poten­tial rev­enue num­bers. There’s much to gain, and very lit­tle to lose. Is there any­thing block­ing the way except insti­tu­tional (and pos­si­bly tech­ni­cal) inertia?

I’d like to take some steps down this path with Courant down the road once some other more essen­tial com­po­nents are taken care of, and I’d like to see oth­ers begin exper­i­ment­ing with such ideas on what­ever tech­ni­cal plat­form they know how to work with.