A look at the future of WikiTribune, which was designed to let anyone contribute and edit news stories but has used up its initial crowdfunding funds and grants
Mathew Ingram / Columbia Journalism Review : Tweets: @gijn Tweets: @gijn : Almost a year ago, crowdsourced news site @WikiTribune launched with much fanfare. But earlier this month, it hit a roadblock & laid off its entire team of about a dozen professional journalists. @mathewi speaks to @jimmy_wales on what went wrong @CJR http://www.cjr.org/... http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
When Jimmy Wales launched WikiTribune in April 2017, the pitch was journalists writing stories with volunteers fact-checking them, funded directly by readers as an answer to fake news. Early interviews with Wales already centered on the open question of whether the crowdfunded launch could sustain a professional newsroom, probing the business model and budget within weeks of going live.
Eighteen months on, Mathew Ingram's CJR interview with Wales confirms the answer was no: the initial crowdfunding and grants are spent, and the site has laid off its entire team of about a dozen professional journalists. The story matters because WikiTribune was the highest-profile test of reader-funded, wiki-style news — and its funding exhaustion is the first hard datapoint on whether that model holds.
First-order effects
- WikiTribune's roughly dozen staff journalists are out of jobs immediately, and the site loses the professional layer that distinguished it from pure volunteer wikis.
- Jimmy Wales must either find replacement financing or restructure WikiTribune away from a salaried-newsroom model, since the original crowdfund-and-grants stack is exhausted.
Second-order effects
- Other reader-funded journalism experiments face harder questions from their own backers: WikiTribune's collapse shows a successful crowdfund proves launch demand, not recurring revenue, forcing peers like Civil to defend their substitute-financing plans.
- Wales' likely pivot toward donor-supported structures shifts competition for small-dollar media donations onto platforms already soliciting the same pool of contributors.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, hybrid journalist-plus-volunteer newsrooms give way to donor-funded community platforms — the direction Wales himself took when WikiTribune relaunched as WT:Social, a donor-funded news-sharing network rather than a staffed newsroom.
- Grant- and crowdfund-dependent news ventures look structurally fragile as a category: Civil's failure to replace ConsenSys funding and shut down after losing its major backer mirrors WikiTribune's arc, suggesting the field consolidates around whichever financing model can recur, not whichever launches loudest.
The trend: Crowdfunded journalism startups are learning that one-time reader enthusiasm does not fund a standing newsroom, pushing the category toward donor-subscription and platform models to survive.