Transcript for
2005 Batten Symposium
and Awards for Innovations in Journalism

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

Keynote Dialogue (Page 5):
Jimmy Wales
Founder, Wikipedia; President, Chairman, WikiMedia Foundation

Michael Kinsley
Former Editorial and Opinion Editor, Los Angeles Times

Moderators: Jan Schaffer and Bryan Monroe

Audience Question:
In the case of the L.A. Times, do you think it would be more successful to pose the question "What should we do about it?" instead of just "What do you think?"

Kinsley:
Jan and I were talking about some things that are literally constructive. We have a primitive one at the L.A. Times about what can be done with downtown L.A., and the New York Times had lots about 9/11 and what to do about the World Trade Center, and those can be constructive.

I agree that there is a lot of idiotic interactivity for its own sake, especially in establishment Web sites run by people who feel like they ought to be more interested in this than they are. My favorite one is on MSN or MSNBC where at the end of every story they say, "On a scale of one to 10, would you recommend this story to a friend?" "Thousands die in New Orleans flood." Would you recommend that to a friend? It's sort of ridiculous.

Monroe:
Along those lines, particularly in opinions, our friend Dan Gillmor would say, "Our readers are smarter than we are." Certainly wikis have shown that in some areas, but, for example, my father is a retired two star general who led the logistics operation during Hurricane Andrew in Miami, and he's been calling me during the Katrina recovery saying, "They screwed this up, they should have done this." And I say, "Dad, someone should hear you besides me – I can't do anything." So the Miami Herald called him up and interviewed him for the editorial page about what went wrong with the FEMA response, and he was excited to share his opinion with more people than just his son who doesn't listen to him anymore.

Certainly the experiment with the wikis in the L.A. Times didn't go as planned, but there are still other ways that traditional mainstream media can reach out to regular folk out there and get those thoughts and ideas, especially from people who are informed in the process.

Kinsley:
First of all, I would say that a two star general is not "regular folk."

I actually resist complete slavish toting to regular folk. I think the Internet has really helped find people who can be of use in news stories. My brother-in-law was trapped in a hospital in New Orleans and he sent us some e-mails and I passed them on to the L.A. Times and CNN and he was a good source for them. That goes on every day, but I think that my colleagues and I do have something to offer people who aren't journalists, and I would hope that if you're working at a journalism school you think you are producing graduates who have something to offer. My analogy is if you go to a restaurant, you do want the food cooked by the chef and not by the guy at the next table.

And furthermore, since I'm now ranting, people love to have their own voices heard, but I don't think they're quite as passionate about listening to the other non-journalists as the word "community," which is used to describe this, would suggest.

Wales:
I think that's probably right.

When you look at the blogs, which is really where you get these unfiltered voices, the bloggers that become successful are similar to someone like Michael Kinsley. They have a unique voice, it's well written and it's interesting. I think most people who are writing blogs are not being read by anyone because no one wants to read about their next door neighbor's cat and things like that.

Audience Question:
How do you work stories on Wikinews when there is controversy, such as abortion?

Wales:
The difference is what the aim is. If the aim is to produce an opinion at the end, then it's pretty hard to produce just one. If the aim is to produce a consensus summary of what the problem is, then it's possible to have just one.

If a newspaper like the L.A. Times came to me and said, "What could we do with wikis? We're thinking of doing editorials." I would tell them that it's really hard.

The thing to do would be to find good members of the community – most newspapers already have a message board so you could use that community – and invite them to participate in a consensus building approach. So you've got some local issue, and you say, "Should we build this road?" And there are some positive developmental aspects but some negative environmental aspects, so you bring in some people from different sides of the community and summarize what the issue is and who says what. I think people can cooperate on things like that.

Audience Question:
Do you have projects that have compromises like that?

Wales:
Yes. In Wikipedia a lot of the issues that you would think would be impossible end up being some of our best work.

Kinsley:
What do you have on abortion?

Wales:
It's a great article, and one of the reasons it's great is that it turns out there are people who may disagree, but they are reasonable people who are not unhappy that other people have a voice. So those people get together and if someone comes in with a really one-sided view they tell them to stop because they've spent six months negotiating one paragraph that has been carefully vetted and worded.

Kinsley:
It sounds like you've done Ceasefire, and if it works that's great.

Audience Question:
Everyone has some sort expertise in at least one area, so in that sense there is no such thing as "regular folk." How does a news organization involve citizens in the way that best gets to their expertise?

Wales:
I think what we're seeing right now is a lot of healthy experimentation, including the L.A. Times experiment, in trying to figure out how to involve all of the people that want to participate.

The first step is to throw up a message board on your site and let people rant back at you. But what kind of technologies do people need to be able to empower healthy, good voices while at the same time not degenerating into the bad people just making noise. There is a lot of cool stuff that is yet to be figured out.

Monroe:
The other piece to that is that there are regular folk who don't have access to this and don't have a broadband connection, who don't have a credit card to establish a cable modem or DSL. The people who live in the Ninth Ward in New Orleans didn't know the water was coming until Monday, because those who were reporting out of the French Quarter and the Superdome or covering those of a higher class level weren't doing the reporting. Accessing the voices of those regular folks, especially in low income and often cases in communities of color, how do you do that when there are those barriers?

Kinsley:
Maybe this is way too optimistic, but I think that problem may not exist in 10 years. There is not a problem in this country of people not having access to television, but there was a time when television was very expensive. A computer is now $300; it was $3,000 not so long ago, and I think there will be a time – in less time than it would take us to create a program to deliver broadband universally – when people will have it. Maybe that's naïve, but that's my suspicion.

Wales:
I tend to agree with you for New Orleans. For us, we think in a really global way, and one of the issues we have is that there are more articles today in the Luxembourgish Wikipedia than there are in the Arabic Wikipedia, even though Luxembourgish is a tiny language spoken in a tiny little part of Europe. It's spoken by people who have access, where Arabic is spoken by people who by in large don't, so that problem on a global level of access is a big one.
But I tend to think with the increasing growth of wireless networks and cheaper laptops we're going to see that problem go away, but it may not be 10 years.

Kinsley:
Al Gore wanted a big federal program so that the computers could talk to each other, as he put it, and I voted for Al Gore – I'm a big fan – but that was a dumb idea.

Schaffer:
Closing thoughts: What next? Is participatory with a capital 'P' the future?

Wales:
I would urge people, especially the people in this room, to take a close look at how Ohmy News works out of Korea. If you're not familiar with Ohmy News, you should get familiar because they've got a model that's very different from our model. It's for profit, they pay contributors – or some of them – and they're huge in South Korea and they're starting to branch out into other areas.

It may not be that they are going to compete, but their model probably has within it some things that could be part of the answer here.

Kinsley:
I think that there will be in the next 10 or 20 years a place for journalism as we know it today, which is someone sitting down at a keyboard and writing a story that is then read by other people in the way we're used to, but I don't think it's going to be on paper.

Wales:
I think what's going to kill paper isn't citizen journalism, it's Craigslist, because they're taking the classifieds away.

Monroe:
With 15 employees...

Kinsley:
I think that's right. I think in newspapers, the first things to go will be the classifieds because they are so profitable, and opinion because it's so unprofitable. It'll be the stuff in the middle – the news – that they'll keep for a while.

Schaffer:
Our time is up, but this has been great. We've loved having both of you. Thank you very much.

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