NO JOY FROM SIMON

Simon Waldman has a post about three ways to make money from blogs: have enough reader support to drive donations or advertising; get hired by Gawker, Weblogs Inc. or one of the other blog publishing houses; or provide the software. I’m out of luck on all three counts.

More seriously: Simon, the director of digital publishing for The Guardian, has some strong words about Wikinews and how it isn’t working.

So what’s wrong? Well, look at it and be honest. Is there a story there that you haven’t seen elsewhere? Does it even half fulfill the ’service’ bit of being a news service? Not just that – if you look at it today – does it make you think that you really must come back tomorrow if you want to know what’s going on in the world?

Yes, they might have had a scoop or two but at the same time, they’ve also failed to cover hundreds of stories that happen every day – consistently presenting at best a handful of headlines that it would be easier to read elsewhere.

Since I first heard about Wikinews, I’ve been unconvinced. The idea behind Wikinews has been outpaced by technologies like RSS. AP has joined Reuters in offering RSS feeds. Most major newspapers have feeds. With an aggregator and a handful of subscriptions, I can scan more news than any single site can hope to offer.

What’s missing from mainstream media are the unmediated personal reports of events but, as the Indian Ocean tsunami showed, when major events happen, the personal bubbles to the top of the net and quickly spreads, sometimes through major media.

I don’t think the world stage is where citizens media will make its impact. It will be at the local level where involved, engaged people will have the biggest impact on remaking media, and the global impact will come from the combination of those local efforts. There’s a need to develop a way to aggregate those local efforts and make them easy to find and access. The wiki model may be one way of doing that. I don’t think Wikinews is.