“The news is broken.” Can Jimmy Wales fix it?
Tim Parrack
Leading an awesome team of proven, fractional (part-time) CMOs and Marketing Directors to help ambitious businesses get real business results and achieve their growth targets
Who knew that Jimmy Wales was on the board at the Guardian Media Group?
Well, he isn’t. Not any more.
That’s because, having spent the last year learning what he could about reputable news reporting and how the business model at the Guardian works (or arguably doesn’t!), he’s now left so that he can set up a competitor.
WikiTribune, it seems, is the Wikipedia founder’s attempt to counter fake news. It will offer ‘factual and neutral’ news on a large scale.
As Wales said on BBC: “I think we’re in a world right now where people are very concerned about making sure we have high quality fact-based information, so I think there will be demand for this”.
I hope so. It sounds like a brave and noble idea, and one which we should support. But it’s hard to see what a 20-strong team of journalists, supported by written (and financial) contributions from the public, can do to compete with the might and size of the BBC, New York Times, FT and such like. But someone has to take the plunge, and I can’t think of anyone I would rather trust to attempt this, despite Wikipedia’s dubious record of reporting reliably on all things from the Westminster bomb to Robbie Willams’ love of animals.
Speaking personally as an ex-journalist, I’ve been cynical about the advertising-led models that compromise genuine journalism for some time, and recently I’ve begun to doubt even some of our most trusted news sources, so I’ll be watching developments with a keen eye.
I look forward to seeing the business model.