Union-Tribune goes wacky for wiki

By Marcelo Duran
Associate Editor

The San Diego Union-Tribune has gone wiki.

The paper’s first wiki, AmplifySD, went live last month and is aimed at the city’s music scene. Visitors can post articles, images, video and MP3 clips of their favorite bands, said Chris Jennewein, vice president of Internet operations at Union-Tribune Publishing Co.

If successful, the paper hopes AmplifySD will breathe new life into the grassroots approach first attempted by the Los Angeles Times’ ill-fated Wikitorial experiment in 2005. The Times’ Wikitorial let users post and edit opinion stories, but the paper had to shelve it after only three days after the site was flooded with inappropriate material.

Jennewein said The Union-Tribune hopes to avoid the Times’ pitfalls by using monitoring and management tools offered by MindTouch Inc., whose Nexus software is anchoring AmplifySD.

The San Diego Union-Tribune’s AmplifySD Web site is an effort to breathe
new life into the wiki approach.

Nexus is a hosted app that integrates with the paper’s SignOnSanDiego.com Web site and publishing software and lets editors manage how user-generated content is blended with existing editorial and syndicated information.

Contributors can post text, images, video, MP3 clips and link related stories or pictures — all of them indexed, searchable and taggable.

“We had two editors on our staff plus a local music expert doing the initial population of the site and then we opened it up to the fans,” Jennewein said, explaining how the site was developed.

Second part

The second phase of the project includes integrating wiki modules onto SignOnSanDiego.com’s community sites covering North County and East County. That’s expected to happen within the next few months, Jennewein said, adding that he has high hopes for the wikis.

“The wiki steps beyond simple comments and forums and becomes a place where the community creates an organized and comprehensive guide to what’s important,” Jennewein said. “As editors we can guess, but with the wiki technology we’ll know what the community is truly interested in.”

The newspaper plans to launch two more community sites by the end of the year.

Jennewein said that the newspaper isn’t sure what it’ll find out through the wikis, but he said he believes the software will enable users to access powerful tools that will help editors set the agenda for coverage.

“The wikis will be mainly text,” he said. “For example, in East County we may find that recreational activities are very important or people may write about the best places to fish, hike or run.

“We may find that local government becomes very important or that traffic is a hot-button issue.”

Users can view the community sites without restrictions but must register to contribute content.

Managing responses

Jennewein said he’s optimistic that SignOnSanDiego.com’s wikis will avoid the torrent of pornography and foul language that spelled the end of the Times’ Wikitorial feature.

“Looking at this over a number of years, you occasionally get bad entries but the percentage is very low,” he said. “We’re talking about under 1 percent.”

Jennewein said The Union-Tribune does not plan to use the wiki material to generate reverse printed community-oriented publications similar to YourHub.com or TribLocal (see Newspapers & Technology, May 2007), but he didn’t rule out the option of using the community material in the daily paper.

Jennewein wouldn’t disclose how much The Union-Tribune is spending to support the wikis. The paper pays for hosting, initial customization and integration, but MindTouch itself is compensated through a pay-for-performance model, according to Ken Liu, the vendor’s chief executive officer.

“The payout for us is the page views, and at this point we negotiated very good terms with The Union-Tribune,” Liu said. “As they generate page views, they monetize that and we get a certain percentage.”