Wikitribune, the crowdfunded news platform from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, was announced last week, but we’ve seen relatively few details about how it will run and the kinds of topics it will cover.
On Thursday, I got the chance to talk to Wales about some of his goals for the site. (And for a bunch of good questions that I didn’t ask, see his recent Reddit AMA.)
Pure citizen journalism has “hit a wall,” Wales said. Wikitribune is set up as a for-profit site that will be entirely funded by readers, though he’s also putting in some money himself. The site will focus on general news coverage, particularly politics, at first, he said — but his longer-term goal is that it will cover more niche topics like Bitcoin and dog breeding.
1. Distribution/syndication: In other words, greater reach. National news organizations have a practical where-mission-meets-business opportunity here: Because they’re not bound by geography, they need distribution to reach and connect with new audiences. Many of the national news organizations I’ve spoken to say audience development is their core strategic challenge — namely “how do we reach more of the people that matter for our mission and our revenue?” There are many components of building an audience, of course (social, search, email, great digital products, “sticky” user experiences, etc.). Distribution relationships can also fuel growth. For example, The Washington Post’s partner program provides complimentary digital subscriptions as a perk to subscribers of a large number of local papers across the country and is one of the contributing factors to its huge digital audience growth of late. Distribution arrangements can also work in reverse (local news on national sites), although achieving any sense of scale is less valuable to local sites that are typically more focused on engagement in their communities. Ways to partner on distribution:
Last year, the giant Scandinavian publisher Schibsted restructured its product team. It centralized its efforts, creating one unified product and technology group that worked across all its publications. The idea was that the product team would be able to work with individual publications to develop new products before scaling them out to the rest of the company.
