A report on Mashable has taken an in-depth look at the impact that Google Wave is having on journalism.
The real-time wiki collaboration platform is still in its preview phase and can be used by invite only, but already some media companies are using the tool for community building, real-time discussion, crowd-sourcing, collaboration both inside and outside the newsroom and for cross publishing content, according to the report.
What Google Wave has done is to have pulled together the component Google applications that people use and allow them to converge. Users can share photos, embed videos, and add in other apps such as Google Maps and Google Calendar to create customized blocks of user-editable content.
The report has plenty of examples of how journalists in the US are using the tool in just these ways. The Chicago Tribune’s RedEye blog, for instance, now has a daily “wave” during which readers give feedback and discuss the cover story of the day.
Redeye’s web editor Stephanie Yiu told Mashable: “It’s a lot more live than Twitter because it’s like you can see people typing and everybody gets to know each other.
“It’s really about connecting with our readers on a new platform. We’re learning with our readers and moving forward together.”
Meanwhile, Andrew Nystrom, senior producer of social media and emerging platforms for the Los Angeles Times described how his own recent experiments highlighted the potential that Google Wave has for crowd-sourcing.
He said: “That experiment was definitely an eye-opener. My understanding of Wave has always been that it’s a valuable tool for small-team collaboration. So to see it succeed as a larger-scale crowdsourcing tool was unexpected to say the least.
“People quickly swarmed the wave and provided a ton of really smart insights. Things we had never thought of.”
Over $5 million (£3 million) is to be shared among the winning projects, all of which seek to provide innovative ways for news and data to be shared with communities.
Among the successful bidders are an open platform document-sharing scheme and a project to develop data visualisation tools.
Receiving over $350,000 from the Knight News Challenge is MediaBugs, which plans to create a national website where readers can report journalistic inaccuracies published online or in print.
The brainchild of Salon.com co-founder Scott Rosenberg, MediaBugs hopes to promote transparency among reporters when it comes to admitting and fixing their errors.
Another recipient of a significant sum is a wiki project from New York’s Gotham Gazette.
The online news provider will use its $250,000 grant to fund the creation of a wiki dedicated to the law-makers at the city council.
Gotham Gazette is planning to use the wiki to inform citizens about local politics and share information about city legislators.
Mobile journalism is the focus of a winning bid from the co-founder of MobileActive.
A $200,000 grant will fund the organisation’s plans to create the downloadable Mobile Media Toolkit.
The toolkit will feature applications for video and audio as well as a function enabling content distribution on social networking sites.
A list of the nine winning projects is available on this pdf file.
The Knight News Challenge is a five-year contest to fund community-focused digital journalism projects.
The Washington Post has unveiled a website dedicated to the people and personalities that make up the city’s political class.
WhoRunsGov.com has currently launched in a beta version, boasting in-depth profiles of America’s senators, representatives, Pentagon officials and administrative staff.
For example, each senator profile provides a career biography of its subject as well as information on their views, voting records and key collaborators.
According to PR Inside, the aim is to provide a free online resource holding policy biographies on all the key decision-makers working in politics, law, and the military.
In addition, the site notes that the first group of profiles has been created by a dedicated editorial unit within the Washington Post.
The website’s creators plan to enable users to upload their own profiles of government figures in the future when the resource becomes more of a moderated wiki.
“The site gives political, business and opinion leaders, as well as students, educators and engaged citizens, a destination for crucial, real-time information on Washington’s key players,” said Rachel Van Dongen, the editor of WhoRunsGov.com.
She added: “This is the first phase of a new venture to create a uniquely collaborative and rich information resource that demystifies the individuals behind Washington’s policy-making process.”
The site also includes a regularly updated Washington politics news blog entitled The Plum Line.
How important a role did social media websites play in the coverage of last week’s attacks in Mumbai?
This question is being debated by journalists, bloggers and academics so here’s a brief guide to some of the articles cropping up.
According to Variety, citizen journalists claim they provided quicker and more accurate reports as events unfolded [HT - Editors Weblog].
It may well have been faster but Varity states that “much of the information on Twitter was woefully inaccurate”.
The microblogging platform forms the main point of enquiry in an online article on CNN, which asserts that users were sending a total average of 80 tweets every five seconds.
CNN points out that some of these messages held practical information such as pleas to potential blood donors to go to hospitals where supplies were running low.
The US broadcaster also notes that Twitter users were “mobilised to help with transcribing a list of the dead and injured from hospitals, which were quickly posted online”.
However, CNN does echo Variety by stating that a significant number of tweets “amounted to unsubstantiated rumors and wild inaccuracies”.
Despite reports showing extensive use of social media sites such as Twitter, one US-based academic contends there was an unexpectedly low amount of user-generated content.
Gauruv Mishra from Georgetown University told Journalism.co.uk that he had anticipated the attacks would have drawn more coverage by users in terms of photos and videos.
However, he did point out the photos uploaded by one eyewitness to his Flickr photo stream as events took hold.
Finally, Amy Gahran produced a round-up of social media reporting from Mumbai as the attacks continued.
Writing on Poynter Online, Gahran highlighted coverage on a current events section of Wikipedia, multimedia reports on NowPublic, and updates and thoughts emerging from the Indian blogosphere.
(Wikis enable users to create and edit content – more information on them can be found on this Spotlight Post which we created in June this year.)
The brainchild of a Web developer, the wiki has content spread across seven different subject titles – including Art & Culture, History & Heritage, Sport and Environment.
Within each heading there are then entries on people, places, events and topics and these can be added to by any registered member.
Registered users can also create their own topics within the subject areas and can edit articles written by others.
Evening Chronicle editor Paul Robertson explained that the wiki provides a platform where newspapers and readers can share their knowledge about the region.
He said: “We have an amazing archive of material on all manner of subjects but we also have an army of readers in the region across our titles who have their own mines of information which they now have an opportunity to share through wikinortheast.
“If the amount of work put in is anything to go by it deserves to be a success and the site has already attracted positive comments even though it has only just gone live.”
The site came about after Trinity Mirror asked staff to contribute ideas for innovation in journalism.
Louise Midgley from NCJ Media won the contest and will receive a share of any profits which are generated by the wiki.
A talk radio show is inviting users to help to produce a weekly segment about some of the hot topics for the forthcoming American presidential election.
The Brian Lehrer Show in New York has created a wiki where visitors are asked to suggest angles, questions and guests to appear on future spots devoted to issues such as immigration and healthcare.
Users are also encouraged to carry out their own background research and provide tips on audio clips that could be used.
According to the WNYC station’s website, the aim is for listeners to collaborate on producing a segment and “do everything a normal Brian Lehrer Show producer does every day”.
The wiki has been created using free Media Wiki software and features an introductory message from Lehrer, explaining the idea behind the project.
He writes:
Remember, a wiki is a collaboration, not a debate. Work together with people you agree with and people you don’t to shape a segment that addresses the questions and concerns of all interested parties and the public at large. This is pretty experimental for talk radio. We believe you can handle it and help produce more thorough, more balanced coverage than any professional journalists can do without you!
Welcome to the latest SPOTLIGHT post. This week’s subject is the wiki - something which always seems to be on the cusp of becoming the next big thing in journalism.
Firstly we’ll look at what a wiki actually is before showing some examples of how wikis are being used by journalists and then offering links to some practical guides.
“A wiki is an application that allows Web users to contribute to a site and edit its content. Collaborative Web sites based on the wiki principle are themselves known as wikis, a term derived from the Hawaiian word for quick.”
Unlike blogs where the author is in control of the content and visitors may only contribute via comments, wikis place control firmly with their users - whoever they may be.
And how much control is up to the administrator - visitors can have the power to add, remove and edit content as well as change the structure of the wiki by creating new pages.
These changes are usually tracked by a page history which shows all the previous versions of each page.
Importantly, users do not need to know any computer code in order to submit their content so wikis essentially enable non-techies to create and edit websites.
For a simple and effective explanation of wikis, here’s a video tutorial from Common Craft.
While a brief history of the wiki is supplied by online journalism lecturer and blogger Paul Bradshaw on his wiki.
The Wiki Landscape
Thanks to their user-friendly features and ease of creation, there are millions of wikis on the Web and on intranets around the world.
Like blogs, there are also lots of different providers who supply the requisite software and templates.
Perhaps the best known wiki is Wikipedia - “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” - which now boasts almost 2.5 million articles created by its community of registered users.
But wiki creators don’t necessarily have to think this big as they can take advantage of the so-called wiki farms which enable beginners to quickly set up their own little space on their wiki pages.
From PBwiki to WikiSpaces to Wetpaint, there are plenty of organisations offering free wikis to anyone from major corporations to primary schools and individuals.
Wiki Journalism
So what has any of this got to do with journalism? Well, advocates of wiki journalism suggest that the collaborative nature of wikis makes them an ideal platform for the integration of user-generated content.
Birmingham City University lecturer Paul Bradshaw has asserted: “Wikis allow news operations to effectively cover issues on which there is a range of information so broad that it would be difficult to summarise effectively in one article, or by one journalist, alone.”
And Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has said mainstream news organisations could use wikis as a space on their site where local communities can post their own news.
Bradshaw has also provided a useful guide to categorise the different ways journalists can use wikis and here’s some of the main types he suggests:
Crowdsourcing Wikis – This asks users to contribute information on big topics or ideas to produce an article or resource with a depth that could not have been produced by journalists alone.
Second Draft Wikis – Journalists write an article and upload it to a wiki so users can make amendments.
Open Wikis – Where users have the freedom to write anything about subjects of their choosing.
Now let’s have a look at some of these ideas when they’re put into practice.
Wikinews
One of the few examples of an open wiki devoted entirely to citizen journalism is Wikinews, which is owned by Jimmy Wales and his Wikimedia Foundation.
Wikinews boasts original reporting and aims to provide news written from a neutral standpoint.
Its guidance page also reveals that Wikinews wants to give a voice to communities which feel underrepresented in the mainstream media.
Wikinews is yet to emulate the widespread success of its counterpart Wikipedia but it is proving to be a popular go-to site in the wake of major breaking news stories such as Hurricane Katrina.
Mainstream Media & Wikis
Not many mainstream media news providers have used wikis in the course of their online coverage, but here are some of those that have taken the plunge.
The Los Angeles Times invented a new term for its foray into the world of wikis in 2005 when it invited users to make changes to an editorial piece.
Called a wikitorial, the article regarding American action in Iraq was a finished comment piece which visitors were able to edit as they saw fit.
However, some inappropriate editing saw the wikitorial taken down by LA Times staff, as this Guardian article explains.
A year later, technology magazine Wired conducted its own wiki experiment by putting up an unedited article for users to amend on SocialText.
The piece attracted almost 350 edits and writer Ryan Singel outlined the positive and negative aspects of this group editing project in a subsequent Wired article.
Since the experiment, Wired has launched two ongoing open wiki projects where users are given more freedom.
The Big Questions wiki invites users to post their ideas on what should be the key questions in the world of science while the How-To wiki asks readers to submit articles offering tips and tricks on anything.
Next up is the San Diego Union-Tribune, which is trying to create a resource about the local music scene by using a wiki.
Here’s how they explain the ethos behind the Amplipedia wiki:
“We’re passionate about San Diego music, but we’ll admit we don’t know everything. That’s why we need your help to tell the whole story - about San Diego’s best music venues, bands big and small, and the continually evolving changes in our local music scene.”
The final mainstream media example comes from the UK and shows how news organisations can create wikis which exist outside of their own websites.
Cornwall and Devon Media launched wikiKernow in March this year with the aim that the wiki will become a valued resource for both Cornish natives and visitors to the county.
Pages were initially created by ThisisCornwall journalists but now the site is open to user-generated content and subjects include restaurant guides, town histories and local myths.
Incidentally, environmental journalism students at Michigan State University have done a similar open wiki for North America’s Great Lakes.
Internal Wikis
As well as these external wikis where users are invited to produce content, some newspapers are using wikis as an internal communication tool.
Examples include a closed newsroom wiki created by the Raleigh News & Observer where journalists can post details about ongoing news stories and find out their colleagues’ areas of expertise.
The St Louis Post-Dispatch has installed a wiki to act as a practical information resource for its team of researchers.
Pros and Cons
As the above examples demonstrate, some experiments with news wikis haven’t proved entirely successful and this has led some to suggest that wikis are not really suitable for journalism.
So it would be useful here to provide a brief round-up of some of the perceived pros and cons of wikis.
Daily Telegraph blogger Shane Richmond wrote in 2007 that some of the problems with wikis include vandalism, inaccuracy and authority.
He has suggested that these obstacles need to be addressed before mainstream media can deploy them with confidence.
Meanwhile, Bradshaw outlined on his wiki both the advantages and disadvantages of using the application to report the news.
Under strengths he pointed out that wikis can improve a site’s stickiness and can help journalists identify the issues that their readership want to see addressed.
In his round-up of weaknesses Bradshaw suggested that, quite simply, the vast majority of users don’t know what a wiki is.
Resources
If these examples have inspired you to create your own wiki, then your first action will be deciding what kind of wiki software you’d like to use.
WikiMatrix helps you choose the wiki that suits you through its Wizard device where users input required features - from page history to storage requirements - and it brings up the closest matches.
And Wikipedia has this useful page which compares and contrasts a large number of wiki software providers on a range of categories such as cost, privacy options and editing capabilities.
Once you’ve selected your template, the Thought Farmer blog has six steps to launching a successful wiki project.
It’s chiefly concerned with internal wikis but also has some good tips for setting up public wikis.
Finally, if you want to know more about wiki journalism, Bradshaw’s wiki has this reference list which links to stories about internal and external wikis and to academic articles on the subject.
That’s it for this SPOTLIGHT post, do get in touch if you have an example of a wiki you’ve created and let us know any themes you’d like to see covered in the future.
A wiki concerning all things Cornish has been launched by a newspaper publisher.
Cornwall and Devon Media (CDM) unveiled wikiKernow this month and hopes that the site will become a unique and valued resource for the region.
Reporters at the media group have made a start creating pages, but it’s now up to registered users to add to this and build up pages of fascinating facts about the county.
CDM editor-in-chief Andy Cooper told holdthefrontpage.co.uk: “We feel wikiKernow will provide a fantastic platform for our existing readers and online viewers, and a whole range of new ones, to play their part in building a fantastic site all about Cornwall.
“The beauty of the wiki concept is that people can write and edit their own material and contribute in whichever way they see fit.”
WikiKernow, named after the Cornish name for Cornwall, already has plenty of pages offering information of interest to both natives and tourists.
Topics so far include the infamous Cornish pasty, the mysterious beast of Bodmin Moor, and Cornish emblems and anthems.
The wiki also boasts guides to the county’s beaches and castles, and fact-files on places such as Newquay, Padstow and Land’s End.
Wikipedia could be a valuable roadmap for journalists researching stories online.
That’s the view of a growing number of news professionals and researchers in the US who are coming round to the idea that the digital encyclopedia is a useful gateway to information.
Among the “converts” is New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston, who says Wikipedia acts as a valuable “source guide” for journalists researching certain subject areas.
Speaking to American Journalism Review (AJR), he provided the example of Wikipedia’s entry on thermodynamics: “It has names of researchers whose books were published by eminent organisations, and you can take that as a quick way to find sources.
“So as a tip sheet, as a road map to reliable sources, Wikipedia seems valuable.”
In addition, a copy editor from Washington state said his newspaper is happy to attribute information to Wikipedia once sources have been checked out.
Jim Thomsen from the Kitsap Sun asserted: “The bottom line is that Wikipedia can be a great tool as a central clearinghouse for contextual information.
“But not a single syllable there should be taken at face value.”
The AJR article - Wikipedia in the Newsroom - features interviews with staff at the LA Times and a leading academic and is well worth a look for an insight into the pros and cons of Wikipedia for reporters.
For more info on David Cay Johnston, why not check out his entry on Wikipedia.
This week has seen the launch of a new open-source search engine by the founder of Wikipedia.
Wikia Search is the brainchild of Jimmy Wales and represents his attempt to create an open and transparent internet search facility.
This means that the site operates in a similar way to Wikipedia, with registered members helping to filter and rank search results.
The founders reveal their big ambitions in the launch statement, asserting that the facility “represents the first draft of the future of search”.
A recent report also stated that Wales and Co are aiming high with Wikia Search and ultimately aspire to become a major rival to market leaders such as Google and Yahoo!
The search engine’s four principles are: Openness about how its algorithms operate, enabling community participation, providing quality results and protecting privacy.
A political news and views website launched in the US is using a wiki platform in an innovative approach to its subject.
PoliticalBase.com aims to become an information hub for journalists and voters in the US and is using similar interactive technology deployed by sites such as Wikipedia, reports C/Net News.
Users contribute to the site’s content, which includes entries on individual politicians and information on government departments, and submit their work to a staff editor for checking.
The site also lists its top posters and users on its homepage and allows political bloggers to embed its own charts on their pages.
An online discussion forum and networking site for new media journalists across the UK has been created by the head of digital news at the Wrexham Evening Leader.
Christian Dunn said he hopes the newly created wiki will provide a place where online reporters and other users can share top tips on digital content and provide advice to one another, reports holdthefrontpage.co.uk.
Dunn is also appealing for journalists who know of any similar blogs or discussion forums to sign up and create links to relevant sites.
"Like just about everything on the internet, this idea will only work if members sign up and actually use it to their benefit,” he said, adding: "I'm sure many of us are trying to work our way around similar problems which we could help each other with - without affecting the hits on our own sites.
"If digital news in general gets better and readers become more used to getting their news online this will help us all out in the long run."
A report on Mashable has taken an in-depth look at the impact that Google Wave is having on journalism.
