Transcript for
2005 Batten Symposium
and Awards for Innovations in Journalism

Sept. 12, 2005
National Press Club, Washington, D.C.

Keynote Dialogue (Page 3):
Jimmy Wales
Founder, Wikipedia; President, Chairman, WikiMedia Foundation

Michael Kinsley
Former Editorial and Opinion Editor, Los Angeles Times

Moderators: Jan Schaffer and Bryan Monroe

Kinsley:
What percentage of the information in your Katrina story actually comes from the New York Times and the established media, at least indirectly?

Wales:
Virtually all of it. The only exception is in things that are being pulled from the National Weather Service or FEMA or things like that. Definitely the role that we play is the role of synthesis and analysis, not the role of original reporting.

In fact, in the Wikipedia, one of the rules is no original research. People aren't supposed to go out and do that sort of thing because as a community that's really hard for us to check. If we can cite something and say "according to the New York Times," then that's a trusted reliable source, but "according to some guy we don't know," you can't really rely on that.

Schaffer:
But you're not just aggregating the news.

Wales:
It's synthesizing, yes.

Audience Question:
What does that say about WikiNews? One tends to associate news with original reporting.

Wales:
WikiNews is still a young project, and what they're experimenting with in the community is if people can be trusted. It's the same as if you step back for a second and say, "Well how do reporters at the New York Times trust each other?" It's partly because of reputation within the community.

So they're looking at how they can basically elect people to be certified reporters who can then go on and report on events. That's extremely limited, because I think my reputation within the community is at least as good as a New York Times reporter, but I live in St. Petersburg, Fla., and nothing really happens there.

The chances that I'm going to be able to report on a story are slim, because if something like a big murder takes place in town that's getting national attention, I don't have time to go down and report on it. So I think there are limits to the WikiNews model in terms of what you can do as original reporting.

Bryan Monroe, Moderator:
Along those lines, your technology is the ultimate in disruptive technology – it's disrupted Encyclopedia Britannica, it's disrupted the L.A. Times – who else is out there that's ready to be disrupted?

Wales:
I think several things are going on that would be candidates. Right now we're all text and blogs are all text, and we haven't seen a whole lot of models built around citizen video and that's a whole area where people can go out and do all kinds of things that are going to be disruptive, perhaps, to television. I'm not so much talking about the television news because I think that's a difficult one, but situation comedies or reality shows or whatever are things that people can go out and do. Reality shows have become very popular, but they're great because they're cheap to film as well, so why can't a group of people get together and make up a game and make it interesting? We haven't seen a lot of that yet, but that's partly becaue the tools aren't there yet.

Audience Question:
So how long before you do so much disruption that you have nothing to synthesize?

Wales:
That's a good question, but I think the question contains the seeds of an answer, which is that it's really not possible, I believe, for citizen journalism to completely displace professional journalism.

What I think we're going to see is hybrid business models. When the first beginnings of the personal computer revolution came about, people predicted the death of IBM because they did things the old way with big mainframes and so on, but IBM changed their business practices, adapted and survived while other mainframe companies died.

I think it's the same thing for mainstream journalism. There's all this interesting stuff that's starting to happen on the Internet with citizen participation and some papers are going to ignore that and they're just going to die because they can't keep up. Some smart players are going to say, "Hey, this is a great way to form a hybrid organization where we've got professionals and we've got citizen involvement so we're getting the benefits of both." I think those are the models that are going to make sense in the future.

Kinsley:
Yahoo! News has three staff members and they're the number one or number two news site on the Web, and that's basically because they're getting it from some of the people in this room. How is that going to sustain itself?

Wales:
I assume for the news feeds they get from everywhere, Yahoo! pays for that. Like when they have an AP story on their site, they pay for that.

Kinsley:
Google News doesn't pay.

Wales:
Google News, though, drives traffic. So whoever they're driving traffic to would monetize it that way.

Audience Question:
What is the affect that wikis will have on other professions as they lead citizens to be more educated about things like legal advice and health care?

Wales:
That's a tough question. One of the things that I think is happening right now is that every journalist lives in fear of making some sort of mistake that's going to get the blogosphere going crazy, so they have their feet to the fire all the time, which isn't a bad thing.

The one thing that comes to my mind is textbooks. The textbook market is really a narrow group of powerful publishers who don't face the kind of pressures yet from the Internet that newspapers do. Projects like Wikipedia to some extent – but we're not doing textbooks – and our project WikiBooks and a lot of other projects out there are trying to get together experts to create freely licensed textbooks, and those kinds of things are going to radically change the market for textbooks. Even in the wealthy Western countries, it's quite a burden to buy a chemistry textbook – it's quite expensive for students. It's completely impossible for students in Africa to get a chemistry textbook – it just doesn't happen. These technologies are going to change that.

Monroe:
Mike, you have been through many forms of journalism and media – broadcast, online, and print at the L.A. Times. How have you seen change being adopted – or being fought kicking and screaming – in the mediums you've been through?

Kinsley:
The most kicking and screaming was at the L.A. Times. It is amazing the things that are automatic on the Web that newspapers still don't do. I tried to get a little box on the editorial page that simply said, "We have lots of comment analysis elsewhere in this paper," and there's great sports columnists and the L.A. Times is full of wonderful stuff, and I was thinking like a Web person with the idea that people would come to the editorial page to get to other pages. But that never happened and I spent a year trying to do it.

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