Robb Montgomery

Truth is, I don’t really have time to blog today but I am squeezing this in because there are a number of web debates now circling around my co.mments feed.

Among the topics: Citizen Journalism (or do we mean ‘Networked Journalism’ or ‘Participatory Journalism’ now?), Wikipedia’s secret mailing lists, Web stupid newspaper editors, and even more layoffs of professional journalists.

Questions from students of journalism
I am online to reply to questions posed to me from a Medill student journalist that I taught last week. Alex wants to know why Wikipedia ranks so high in search engines and why people use it even though it is prone to be easily manipulated by those who want it to serve their own interests.

Curious to see just how many corporations are, uh, polishing, their Wiki entries now? Take a tour through Wikiscanner to see the IP addresses of the Wikipedia ‘editors’ and which companies they are filing from.

But first . .
Now, I have my little podcast studio pulled apart in order to rewire and refine the signal paths and I really have to get that done so that I can record a podcast with the Poynter Institute’s Howard Finberg tomorrow. I’ll take a picture later and update this so you can see why Chicagoan’s like me actually relish snow days. Six inches of snow on the way and projects like this were made for such events.

San Diego layoffs
If I lived in San Diego I would never have even built a studio. I would be outside all the time. Unfortunately the San Diego Tribune is asking a contigent of it’s non-core journalists to take a long walk away from their newsroom. Only certain classes of journalists are eligible for the buyout packages.

Jimbo Wales - the amateur editor professionals love to hate
I chaired Jimmy Wales session at the World Editors Forum in Moscow last year and to say he was facing a hostile crowd of editors and publishers would be an understatement. It was a bit testy to convene a dialogue between executive editors who manage million dollar editorial payrolls and a man who ‘employs’ amateur editors for free.

They really are two polar opposites and, the irony, is of course that that to give any Wiki entry a dose of authenticity these editors must cite ‘reliable sources’ in their markups. Reliable sources being news organizations, of course.

So to answer Alex’s question . . .
Search engine rankings are controlled by a few factors namely keywords, navigation, and how many other quality pages link to you. There are more obvious ways, too. The New York Times boosted it’s Web presence by buying about.com. “If you can’t build it, buy it,” Vivian Schiller told me in Moscow when I asked why her nyt.com numbers jumped so drastically.

For the rest of us that leaves keywords and linkage.
Wiki software does a good job of generating keywords and the text is easily crawled by search bots. Properly configured blogs also generate a lot of links and keywords, too. And they spit out RSS feeds which drives repeat business.

Until very recently many news organizations rarely linked ‘off-site’ and, as a result, few people would link back to them. Walled-garden thinking by media execs has not helped professional journalists.

The open source and participatory nature of Wikipedia was at first addictive and if you don’t mind your contributions being edited by, let’s say, a nurse who reviews new Wiki items in between changing bed pans . . . then Wikipedia is for you. That’s not a knock on Wikipedia - it’s what we all should be a little more aware of. There’s passion and expertise out there waiting to add to our larger bowl. Not a lot of people will go to that trouble to do it, but enough will if you make the tools easy enough to use.

Bringin’ it home
Which is something that The Chicago Tribune should study a little more.
They have launched a You Tube channel and, as previously reported, built a Facebook page, but why is it that I cannot leave comments on Steve Johnson’s blog?

Steve, for those of you who don’t know, is the paper’s Internet Critic.
Hmmm. K. Explain that to me people. You see fundamental community misses like this from a publishing company and you wonder aloud “WTF?”
Did I mention that the title of his blog is called “hypertext” and that his copy contains no links.
Alex, perhaps this sorry example illustrates best why newspaper content ranks lower than Wikipedia.
Maybe the Trib will adopt SEO and community building tools in the site’s next redesign . . . . sigh.

More secrets about Wikipedia
Today I am reading that there is a backlash as those amateur editors at Wikipedia are fighting to keep their elite status in their online community. They seem to be falling into the same trap that big media gatekeepers do. The same hubris that says “we set the news agenda here, so our voices are louder than yours.”Jimmy Wales ought to know.
This will be interesting to watch.

BTW, why edit for Wikipedia for free when you can edit The Guardian and earn close to a million dollars a year in compensation?

Full Disclosure: In previous lives I have worked as a pulp edition editor for Copley (Which own the Union Tribune) and also for the Chicago Tribune.