Journalism chronicles: Gannett down; Wikipedia video up

As rumors swirl that giant newspaper publisher Gannett may lay off thousands next week,
Wikipedia prepares to add video. How are the two related? Wikipedia current-event-entry news is perhaps the most immediate relative in the journalism family to the amazing Twitter coverage of the Iranian election protests, that’s how.

Wikipedia current events entries are created by professionals and amateurs working together around the world. The entry authors deliver news of events but also realtime fact-checking and interpretations of the information being reported. With each entry there is also a discussion page, where the entry itself and the questions it raises are considered. In addition to Twitter feeds, imagine all of the videotape of the Iranian protests stacked up in one place and being worked over by producers and translators and analysts all at once. No one editor. Lots of editors. Chaos! Madness! Genius! It’s the way we live now… or at least soon.

Wikipedia video will be hosted on the open-source platform Kaltura. The timeline for roll-out is unsure. You can test out the video editing interface here.

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