Wikipedia Founder: How To Save The Newspaper Industry -from MediaPost.com

News is widely syndicated — and that’s one reason why it’s difficult to charge for the content, Wales said. “If you went into Google News and didn’t see 600 copies of the same story, but just one, that one could make money — and spreading it everywhere doesn’t make sense”.

I personaly feel that newspaper are too worried about damaging their credibility and cache to just give up something like the sports section to local sports nuts, but if phased in properly I can see it working.  Look at Seeking Alpha (I’m a contributing media writer, though I haven’t contributed anything in a while) as a model.  I don’t know what their balance sheet looks like, but I know that people trust the site enough that it has formed partnerships with companies including Yahoo! Finance, Dow Jones MarketWatch, E-Trade, and CNET. The company is backed by Benchmark Capital, a firm that funded eBay.

The key to launching successful user generated content and sections is #1 visibility: Get the authors in front of lots of people and they will usually do their best to look good and do good.  #2 selection:  Get the most enlightened and fanatical users onboard.  #3 strict enformcement of guidlines: to give readers a sense of security.

But Robert, you just laid into Topix in a recent blog post for being a big useless, flame war inducing, data dump.  That site is user generated.  Yes, and one of their big problems is ignoring rules #1-3 above.    When Wales said “give up”, he was refering to newspapers’ attempt to move their business model online.  Clearly the internet paradigm demands new models and revenue streams.

Related posts:

1. MetaFilter Founder Matt Haughey Q&A – Including a Few Newspaper Answers
2. Hearst Foundation New Media Lecture with Kenneth Lerer, co-founder and chairman of The Huffington Post
3. Wikipedia Versus Top News Sites – Demographics
4. Kindle 2 without Wikipedia XKCD
5. For a Guy Who Writes About Newspapers, Scoble sure is a Good Photographer