“He says the ‘failing New York Times,’ ‘fake news,’ ‘sad.’ Now if people believe what is published in the major newspaper is fake … that’s undermining of civil society,” he said.
Wales said he wants to combat a decline in the quality of media and the public’s trust in media with his new venture, WikiTribune, which was announced earlier this week. Unlike traditional media, which is both advertiser and subscription based, he wants WikiTribune to be subscriber based.
“What I’m hoping to do is engage in experimentation to help people trust media more. It’s really a bad situation right now,” he said.
WikiTribune will be a hybrid model of paid journalists working with trusted members of the Wikipedia community, where the community fact checks information and the journalists write stories. The subscription would be $15 a month, and as subscriptions increase the service can hire more paid journalists.
Thursday will be the third day of the crowdfunding campaign, which Wales said “is going amazingly well,” but he didn’t say how much money has been raised. For every 500 people who sign up, WikiTribune can hire one journalist, he said.
Wales said he thinks the subscriber method can work. He cites the sharp increase in New York Times web subscriptions, and London-based newspaper The Guardian has been successful in encouraging web subscriptions.
He says Wikipedia sufficiently raises enough money through its donations, even though the number of people who donate is much smaller than the number of those who visit (Wikipedia has 400 million visitors a month while only 2 million people donate each year).
“People are willing to pay; we have to ask them. We’ll see. Wikipedia raises a lot of money every year,” Wales said.