aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Friday, December 30, 2005

Wales on journalism’s future

Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder and foundation head, in the UK Times Online today:

“In my vision of the future of the newspaper industry and of journalism in general, people who think that traditional media organisations are going to go away are just kidding themselves,” he says. “That doesn’t make any sense to me. On other hand, people who think that journalism can just stay the way it is are also just kidding themselves.

“What we will see is a set of hybrid models with an increasing amount of citizen participation in the gathering of news and in feedback and in reporting and analysing the news. And at the same time, we’ll have professional organisations managing the process - basically being the core framework.”

He drives a Hyundai:

The “outlaw” Jimmy Wales, it turns out, is a very reasonable revolutionary. A finance graduate, he ended a six-year spell as a futures trader in Chicago in 2000. According to one report, he earned enough money in the commodities markets to “support himself and his wife for the rest of their lives”.

Mr Wales says that is true - but only because he “lives in a normal house and drives a Hyundai”.

Mine is about to turn over 100,000 miles and has only ever needed one tune-up and a thermostat…