Hello, world: this is WikiTribune
As somebody who ran a (now defunct) journalism startup and is still heavily involved in crowd-sourced muck-raking: I think this is exactly the wrong approach to massively collaborative journalism.<p>The thing we need _less_ of is &quot;news&quot;. The thing we need more of is investigation. Even before the digital age, &quot;news&quot; was a way to sell paper with a mark-up. Now it&#x27;s a way to sell eyeballs to advertisers. The fact that the fourth estate emerged was just a lucky byproduct of the &quot;news&quot; industry, even though it is the foundation of the modern respect for the role that journalism plays in society.<p>When it comes to massively collaborative investigation, the key thing is _process_, not product. Even though it has been tried unsuccessfully or semi-successfully many times (ex, old school WikiLeaks, OpenWatch, WikiNews, MuckRock), I still think that this is absolutely the problem that should be focused on.<p>The product of this investigation shouldn&#x27;t be an article with mass market appeal, but really high-quality information that is useful for decision makers in relevant fields.<p>I think in terms of what is needed of tools to be developed and used, the keys are: transparency, data science, and communications process. Various initiatives have been successfully cobbled together using Google Docs, Facebook and Slack, but these are usually projects with finite scope and a handful of participants. Nothing has ever come close to the kind of impact and reach that Wikipedia has had.<p>I currently run the service <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pubmail.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pubmail.io</a> as a tool for investigators and reporters to be more transparent in their email correspondence. Additional tools I&#x27;d like to see are tools for aggregating, combining and slicing relevant datasets for interesting patterns, and a central hub for mission-driven investigative collaboration. This is what my startup made, but it turns out that this is not a very capital-friendly or profit-friendly idea, so I think it would require a patron like Jimbo to really make this happen  in a scalable, impactful way.<p>Still, I wsh this endeavor all the best of luck and hope that it pushes the needle in the right direction.