WikiTribune Fires Its Journalists As A New Community-Oriented Strategy

Wikipedia CEO Jimmy Wales fires journalists from his new media website, the WikiTribune. The site is a digital newspaper modeled on Wikipedia, Wales announces that the site moves to a “community-oriented” where the focus is submissions of contributors rather than journalists.

According to the reports of the Drum, the WikiTribune has fired its twelve editorial staffers. This follows the departure of journalist Peter Bale, who had gathered the team.

He had previously been a senior of CNN and Reuters. The news about the change comes from a statement by Jimmy Wales and his co-founder Orit Kopel. This mentions about “major personnel changes” and orientation to the wider community.

The original vision of the site was to create an online newspaper that would develop like sister webpage Wikipedia. The aim is to combat fake news by combining a collaborative community and fact-checking operation.

And it helps the reading public has the perception that the news is incentivized not based on the fact, but by the profit motive, politics, economic pressure and more. The site has no ad but if you pay a subscription fee, it helps dictate the coverage its reporters turned out.

Kopel also told the Drum that the site has been currently in pilot mode. And Wales posted that the site won’t move to beta in six months. And the company is learning from that mistakes. It primarily seems that there were worries about the influence of the journalist team on the reports and articles.

She added that they think the role of community and the professional editors as equals from the first day of WikiTribune. And there’re no periods that the journalists of WikiTribune “overlook” the community’s contribution, both sides work collaboratively to create the high-quality articles.

According to the following statement of Kopel, they’ve conducted the hunt for “community oriented” editorial team that better work with contributors.