The BBC aired footage of people’s mobile phone video. That’s not what used to be considered ‘broadcast quality’. I started to get into discussions with people in journalists about how Wikinews and Wikipedia can or can’t be credible sources given their collaborative models, but leaving aside the anarchist trust of ‘the people’ for a moment, I want to think about the impact this type of collaborative technology might have.
I firmly argue that in the future, a Wiki-style Web page will exist during peak crisis coverage in mainstream newsrooms of the future. I think journalists will have a similar experience to the one I just had: they will enter material (probably live and wirelessly from the scene of the incident/press conference floor), it will update in front of their eyes and when they go back to add more content, it will have been altered already by the swarm of other (professional, vetted) journalists with password access to that space.
There may even be a space for “citizen journalists” to do so, since the BBC, the Guardian and others also set up blogspaces for eyewitness reports. Don’t dismiss technologies because they seem far-fetched or are appearing in contexts you can’t yet envisage as professional: Rupert Murdoch in a speech to (I think) the US Society of Editors warned that newsprint editors ignore Web-based news developments at their peril.
Right now, Wikipedia and Wikinews have open access. I don’t think they’ll change that, although if Indymedia can discuss getting logins, anything is possible. I can see a possibility for issuing ‘press passes’ to certain people on the basis of qualifications/passing certain requirements and still have a wiki. As it is, there are already people who have the power to freeze a page that is being vandalised. To me, the key is the collaboration, not the open nature. I understand the anti-hierarchical stand of the wiki culture at the same time as I am an editor and therefore have a certain sense that there should be people who have more ‘authority’ to revert changes because they are fact checkers or editors…
But I think it’s fascinating and that’s why I’m interested in being part of the process and discussing the various decisions that are made as time goes on. Wikipedia is certainly much more advanced that Wikinews which currently has little original reporting and is still ironing out processes. That was also interesting: watching the difference between the Wikinews article and the Wikipedia article and wondering about the reasoning behind the service if the Wikipedia is also going to function as a news space… it calls into question the difference between ‘history’ and ‘present’ and is a realisation of the concept of a ‘journal of record’, even more so because versions are preserved in article histories, so people can see how the event unfolded as well as the ‘result’.