Journalism is going to look different
Published Saturday November 21st, 2009
Sue Gardner is executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia, the fifth most popular website in the world.
During her time as a journalist, Gardner started out as a CBC radio reporter in Fredericton and went on to be head of CBC.ca.
This week she visited St. Thomas University as this year's Dalton Camp lecturer, and sat down with reporter Molly Cormier to talk about her job, the blogosphere, and the future of journalism.
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Q: If you weren't doing this, what would be your chosen career?
A: That's a hilarious question! I am the world's most ridiculous workaholic and my staff always laughs at me because I have no hobbies.
Journalists ask me what else do I do, and the answer is nothing. So, sadly, the answer to what I would be doing if I wasn't doing this is I have no idea.
I have no way to know. This is the only thing I do, I spend 15 hours a day doing this.
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Q: Why did you leave journalism?
A: I don't feel like I did leave journalism. My day job today is actually in many ways remarkably similar to my job at the CBC, because at the CBC I thought about things like, did the writers have enough resources to do their jobs, did we need to advance the technology in particular ways to better support the writers, the kind of features the readers were interested in getting from us, how could we reach more people, and financial sustainability.
Those are exactly the same things that I think about today. I mean, when I ran CBC.ca, I didn't have direct interactions on a daily basis with journalists about particular stories.
I was more in a publishing kind of role. My job was to make sure that they could cover the news.
So if you look at that as not being in journalism, then I probably left journalism earlier. I probably really left in 2005, or thereabouts.
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Q: What is the Wikimedia Foundation?
A: The Wikimedia Foundation is a 501C3, which is a non-profit charity according to the IRS.
We're located in San Francisco, and our job is to make it possible for volunteers around the world to come together and collaborate, to develop educational or informational material in all languages, for everyone around the world.
It's a staff of 30 people - it's really small. Our budget is less than $10 million. About half of our money goes to technology so just bandwidth and servers, and tech staff developing the software.
And the other half goes on sort of administration overhead, PR, marketing, legal support for the projects.
Also an increasing number of dollars goes towards outreach to bring in new volunteers, create awareness that Wikipedia wants people to help it and edit it, and to make it possible for them to do that.
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Q: Do you miss being a reporter?
A: It is the best job in the whole world. I spent a year living in New York City freelancing for the CBC, NPR, the Globe and Mail and the BBC. That was in many ways the most fulfilling year I've ever had. I was able to go to the Bronx, and I went into Brooklyn.
It was during the crack epidemic, it was the year they brought back the death penalty in New York State, and I was able to just go in this amazing city and just ask anybody I wanted any question that I wanted to ask them.
For curious people who just want to know stuff, it's the greatest job in the world. But I have to say that what I find most fulfilling about what I do now is that I'm enabling other people to have those experiences, so I'm creating a space where other people can utilize their own curiosities and find out things for themselves.
My actual work is very different, but it's to the same end and for the same purpose. I find it probably personally in some ways more fulfilling to do it through other people than to do it just directly myself.
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Q: What led you to this job at Wikimedia?
A: It was, I think, March of 2007 and I was at a conference north of Toronto so I was not at CBC.ca, I was out that day.
That was the day the Virginia Tech massacre happened and that day I found myself on a bunch of different websites just tracking that story because it was breaking news all day long.
At some point during the day I found myself on Wikipedia and I clicked on the discussion button where you can see the conversation that Wikipedia editors are having in real time about the story.
I just started reading it, and it was fascinating to me because they were having this conversation where they were talking about double sourcing, checking and validating something they had heard on the television news.
They were doing real journalistic work, trying to figure out what sources were credible and what weren't and what they could responsibly publish.
I knew that they were having the same conversation my own newsroom was having back in Toronto, and it amazed me, because I know that journalism is not really a profession, it's not rocket science, it's not surgery, it's really something that anyone can do if you have a reasonable amount of intelligence.
It was clear to me that day that the journalism the Wikipedians were creating was every bit as good as what the CBC or CNN were doing.
I heard they were looking for an executive director so that afternoon I called their office and spoke with the former executive director who had just left them and he and I ended up having a six-hour phone conversation.
I had been thinking about leaving CBC for awhile but I hadn't known what I was going to do next. The minute I found out the Wikimedia Foundation was non-profit, it just seemed ridiculously obvious to me that that's what I should do.
So within two months I moved and took the job and I've been there ever since.
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Q: How is Wikipedia connected to the Wikimedia Foundation?
A: The Wikimedia Foundation supports, sustains, and operates Wikipedia. Wikipedia is run by volunteers - anonymous people all over the world. They work for free and just dive in whenever they want and edit. They've built this huge collection of 14 million articles.
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Q: Who wrote your Wikipedia page?
A: I have no idea! One of the guys on the staff updated it to put in a better photo of me, because I asked him to. But other than that, I don't know who wrote it.
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Q: Do you think the blogosphere is a positive or negative development?
A: I think it's fantastic, totally. Basically, more speech is good, and more platforms, and making it easier for people to talk to each other is good.
People have always tried to talk to each other. The only difference is today it's easier to do it.
But I can't imagine any argument against blogs, because you just want stuff out there, you want people talking about stuff. You want more ability for people to talk about things, and that can't be bad.
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Q: What is your connection to Fredericton?
A: I worked here. I had my very first real job here. I worked in Fredericton for about 18 months on the afternoon show before I moved to Toronto.
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Q: What do you think the future of journalism is?
A: The future of journalism is going to be a lot of different answers; it's not going to be one answer.
I think that some work that professional journalists used to do is going to be done by amateurs, some of that will be the really high end stuff like financial analysis and political work, where subject matter expertise is really important.
I think now that it's possible for anybody to publish, specialists will have blogs like they already do and we'll get information from them.
I also think stuff that's a lot of fun like sports and entertainment will start being created by enthusiastic amateurs, and that's already happening too.
I don't think that professional journalism will go away, because there are too many aspects of the world that need to get covered, and we will be willing to pay for it in some fashion.
It may happen with fewer people, but that work will always be there.
Molly Cormier will graduate from the St. Thomas University journalism program in May. Q&A appears each Saturday.
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