Wikipedia’s Editor Revolt

Crowdsourcing only works when you have a crowd and wikipedia’s crowd is drifting away. Adrian Chen at Gawker argues that it’s because young people “now a’ days” are more likely to expend their cognitive surplus socializing on facebook. 

I think he’s right, but trying to compete with facebook is a bad way to think about it. I can think of a few things you can do on facebook that you can’t do on wikipedia. The problem is that editing on wikipedia is a terrible and unintuitive experience for the uninitiated. If wikipedia wants to recruit a new generation of editors it needs to make contributing feel more like editing a google doc.

Gawanus!

Here’s our new neighborhood, Gawanus, a strip of land between Smith St and 3rd Ave that runs the length of the canal.

Gowanus!

Here’s our new neighborhood, Gowanus, a strip of land between Smith St and 3rd Ave that runs the length of the Gowanus canal.

Brooklyn’s coolest superfund site

Five bridges cross the canal (but only three are cool)

The north bridge on union street

The old bridge on carroll street

The south bridge on 3rd street

Gowanus is where the food trucks sleep

And the artist’s have their trailer park colony

There are enthusiasts

Activists

And poets

A sad facebook social experiment I conducted before leaving Cambridge. Only 5 people joined. I probably just needed a better sign…

I want GlobalPost to succeed.

I met the founder of GlobalPost while working at the Council on Foreign Relations in 2008. He’s a great speaker, very inspiring. His idea for the venture went something like this: Americans would read more international news if international news wasn’t boring/British. His plan was to hire a hundred Mark Twains, sprinkle them around the world, and post their stories on his website.

Intrigued, I signed up for their daily emails. And this morning, like every morning,  I got an email from GlobalPost.

Subject line: “GlobalPost Morning Chatter - March 25”.

And gchat let me preview the content: “GlobalPost Morning Chatter What we’re hearing Need to know: The United Arab Emirates ….”.

This is how their emails always look. And this why I never open them. It’s the same reason I don’t read news stories with terrible headlines. The New York Times doesn’t just write “New York Times Stories and News” in its biggest font on the front page of every newspaper and the GlobalPost shouldn’t either.

The subject line and gchat preview gives GlobalPost a total of 127 characters to write a headline. In those 127 characters their paper gets a chance every day to make a case for me to read their stories. The inbox is the new front page and GlobalPost needs to treat it with the same respect.

Dear NPR, please get real.

Dear NPR,

You’ve had a tough year. You feel like everyone is beating up on you. Well, we’ve been best friends for over ten years and I want to tell you that everything is going to be okay. (Remember when I told my friends in high school that I couldn’t hang out until after This American Life? I didn’t care what they said about us.)  I have some ideas to get you through this year looking better than ever.

But as your friend, it’s my responsibility to tell you the truth. It’s time for you to update your look. Want to know why you’re having trouble expanding your audience and making friends with anyone under 30? Well, it’s because you’re sometimes a little lame, as if Garrison Keillor was trying to “connect” with me by putting on a backwards baseball cap and talking about smoking pot in the 80s.

I’ve had to turn you off several times this past week, and it wasn’t even a pledge week. For starters, no more reports on the state of World Music. Ever. Okay? And I never again want to hear an interviewer condescendingly remind a young musician that “the Beatles were before your time”. What were you thinking?

And you’re going to need a new show too. I heard that you’re finally getting rid of Prairie Home Companion. Fantastic. Can you imagine any television network keeping a show that features live folk music on the air for 37 years and expect to grow its audience? The Simpsons is the longest running show on television and it’s only been there for 24 years. Let’s replace the folk music with something bold and exciting.

Here’s the idea. Produce a show that will do for journalism what Iron Chef and Top Chef did for food culture: a reality contest for aspiring reporters.

Journalists are already competing with each other for the best minute-long stories, so why not let the audience into the editorial room? I want to hear an editor yell out assignments (in Reality TV parlance, that’s called a “challenge”) and I want to hear the crazy story of how these journalists raced against time, hilarious circumstances, and each other, to get the story finished by deadline.

Next Wednesday, my friends and I are getting together to watch Richard (knock on wood) beat Mike and be awarded the prize of Top Chef. We’ll be joined by millions of people racing home to see what happens. NPR, make me race to my radio with a reality show! And the best part is that it won’t just be good entertainment. The competing journalists will be tasked with unearthing stories that people need to hear, from telling the stories of the Great Recession to unearthing corruption at important institutions and profiling our society’s hidden heroes.

Even better, this show will raise respect for good journalism in the same way reality television raised respect for good cooking. Reality television got Americans thinking about chefs as highly trained professional artists and convinced many of us to pay more in order to experience their restaurants. Now extend the metaphor to journalism. Are you salivating yet?

Finally, imagine all the citizen journalists (e.g., bloggers) who will listen to this show, blog about it, and learn how to be better reporters. I take the craft of cooking much more seriously after watching Top Chef, and this show will have the same impact. Anyone can now start a blog and be a reporter, but there’s no show on radio that inspires aspiring reporters to improve their craft.

You can do it NPR. Get me excited about radio again. Raise America’s expectations for reporting. Introduce the nation to the next generation of great journalists. And in the process, create an army of citizen journalists with the skills to tell a story that can change the world.

Google Circles?