Xavier Mas de Xaxàs
From Knowledge Federation
WIKIDIARIO
Wikidiario (WD) is a project on journalism created by Xavier Mas de Xaxàs (journalist) and Ramon Sangüesa (resercher). Its mission is to recover the rule of information over opinion and to reach high quality reporting in the public interest through participation and co authorship.
WD is organized within a community of citizens and professional journalist. Together they build the information from the bottom up, a 180º change in the dominant up-down dynamic of today’s mainstream journalism.
WD users are called upon to contribute news and join a team of professionals to develop this content.
Thanks to its wiki structure, WD can keep tracking the creative process, though improving transparency and honesty. News items can always be re edited.
The community is organized in working groups. One group for every news item. Each group is lead by a professional journalist and can include the sources who have contributed to the information piece. This enhances transversality and crowdsourcing
WD only publishes original news, features and analysis. Opinion is not supported. Comments are not allowed.
Notecalles.info. Notecalles (NTC). A site intended for whistleblowers. Users must register but can remain anonymous. There’re no filters. No control. News has to be brief. Title plus 650 characters. They can be voted and commented. WD can be fed from this pool of information. Content is organized through tags and categories.
Wikidiario.info. Wikidiario (WD). A site for in-depth and multimedia news stories. Registration is mandatory. Names and surnames. Users are organized in groups. At least one professional journalist per group. Stories can be voted but not commented. Members of the group have a private forum through the working process. All members of the group can contribute. Only one member can publish. The information can always be re-edited. WD allows blogging from selected members of the community.
Wikidiario. Why and why now. (Problems and opportunities)
Information is being left without information. It's too expensive to produce. Opinion is much cheaper and seems to be much more useful to strengthen reader loyalty. The information base in traditional and online media is shrinking.
Technology, however, has never been so useful to produce and disseminate information. It allows the reporter to stop being “the qualified voice” and become a mediator between events and society. Technology imposes a new dynamic that requires systemic cooperation.
This cooperation can give journalism enough importance to overcome the information deficit and produce good investigative stories in the public interest.
There is a great opportunity for online media which can develop "cleaned up" information: simple, deep and useful, unsullied by opinion.
WD is designed to produce high quality information because it combines professionalism and participation in a controllable environment.
WD can incorporate new information actors (bloggers, distribution platforms like YouTube and news aggregators like Google News).
WD allows the consumer of information to participate in the production workflow. Not merely as a contributor of content (which he can already do in many ways) but as a true co-author of the information.
We think that journalism needs to open itself to other disciplines in order to achieve a more comprehensive knowledge of truth and reality. Poetry and music, for example, can be very useful. News can be “perfected” with poems and soundtracks. Writers of detective novels, for example, can also contribute to non-fiction crime stories.
For all that, WD transforms dogmatic and vertical journalism (which teaches citizens what is news and what not) into anti-dogmatic and horizontal journalism, where ordinary citizens, experts and professionals collaborate on the development of the information.
WD establishes, for this end, a new relationship with the
audience. The traditional receiver becomes co-creator of the information.
WD changes the traditional information production chain from a line (news-reporter-audience) to a circle (audience-reporter-news-audience). In a circular structure everyone is co-author of the journalistic content.
Being so close to the base of society, WD, is able to produce very local information.
WD is also designed to address the challenges of teaching journalism. It allows students to create multimedia content and to publish it on the same site.
WD is a learning platform for journalism. It has a collaboration agreement with Barcelona Autonomous University (UAB). UAB students have been using Wikidiario for the last three years.
It’s also a working tool at the Catalan Journalist Association’s school.
Wikidiario contributes to sustainable development in higher education by reducing educational costs, by setting a single technological system. It also facilitates distance e-learning.
Thanks to its academic environment, WD can be protected from commercial pressure. This environment ensures a comfortable maturity of the project without being overwhelmed by the need to have intense traffic.
Thanks to its dual platform, WD is designed to meet the need for "party upfront and the business in the back" business model. The party, the noise, is notecalles.info, which allows for anonymity and comments, which promotes mass participation. The quality (business) is Wikidiario.
ProPublica business model –through an endowment and partnerships with traditional media- can also work with WD.
The Wikipedia model of small donations is another option.
Finally, sponsorship has to be taken into consideration. Not traditional ads, but companies willing to link their brands to an initiative such as WD.
