A few days ago I came upon newsless.org, which states that it’s “Time to stop breaking the news, and start fixing it.” In its inaugural post, Matt Thompson presents the following:
Five years ago, blogger Dave Winer and New York Times executive Martin Nisenholtz made a bet. “In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007,” Winer wagered, “weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times Web site.”
When it came time to judge the bet, blogs outranked the Times on four out of the five chosen stories, making Winer the winner. But the real news out of the bet was the site that trounced them both — Wikipedia.
Yes, that’s right. As anyone who’s searched for a hot news item on Google can attest, Wikipedia knows all, and it is consistently at or near the top for nearly any topic in the news. But Matt doesn’t claim that newspapers should be replaced by Wikipedia. He argues that the path to salvation for the troubled newspaper industry is in hyper-local wikis:
Imagine if the work of the hundreds of reporters dispatched daily to cover a city didn’t merely fade into an obscure archive, but added day after day to the work that came before it. An online news site in the era of Wikipedia would be a living archive, adaptable to suit any context, growing to encompass all aspects of life in a community.
Those words were written in February 2008, but they are actually coming to fruition in some places. The Ann Arbor News has transitioned away from being a daily print publication to twice-weekly, and re-focused itself as being “of, by and for the community.” Anyone can register for an account at annarbor.com and begin posting commentary. This is how newspapers can once again become relevant – by acting as the centralized, local place for members of the community to interact and feel welcome. It’s the same formula that made Craigslist such a popular site – and that killed newspaper classifieds in the process.
Granted, AnnArbor.com is not really a wiki at all yet. It’s more of a blog at this point, but that’s still a step in the right direction. If the community embraces this concept, then the staff of AnnArbor.com may one day become the framework upon which community interaction happens, nothing more than a catalyst for wider discussion – which, to me, is exactly what a newspaper should be.
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