Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2017/Sources/Chennai, India strategy salon with media experts - May 30-June 1, 2017/da

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Venue: Head Offices of Vikatan, Dinakaran and The Hindu

Participants: 10 people from the editorial teams of Vikatan, Dinakaran, and The Hindu comprised the meetings.

Baggrund

We met with the print (Srinivasan Ramani and Mr. Ananth) and web (P.J. George and Sriram Srinivasan) teams of The Hindu newspaper.

The questions that were discussed were at the intersection of the Wikimedia movement, media and the The Hindu as an organization. Ravi introduced the strategy building exercise to them and posed the following questions:

  • How has The Hindu adapted over 140 years?
  • What do you think of Wikipedia?
  • Wikipedia in India: strategies to reach more people

Srinivasan Ramani

  •  Filtering out spam on Wikipedia is same as bringing context and credibility to news these days
  • Battle of fact vs. opinion
  • Had to adapt strategic thinking because of two explosions in media: televisions news and social media news
  • For The Hindu, news has gone beyond breaking it; we present context of the news because 1) news is already out there, 2) we don't do eyeball grabbing sensationalism and 3) different formats of representation available now such as visuals, videos, graphics, etc.
  • So for our newspaper, we do text, context and data visualization
  • For the web, we do videos
  • Similar to Wikipedia, we think about reach, given the fact that news is mobile now.
  • Over the next 15 years, we need to think of mobile friendly strategies
  • Wikipedia could help us use APIs to release information such as sortable tables for integration

Sriram Srinivasan

  • Publishers at tail end of innovation so they need to learn from others
  • Biggest challenge right now is fake news and WhatsApp hoaxes, especially for traditional media journalists and newspapers
  • Accountability and credibility needs to be brought back
  • Wikitribune(Ravi clarified that it was Jimmy Wales' pet project)
  • Reaching out to forward looking Tamil editors and publishers such as Kizhakku Pathippagam (Badri Seshadri)
  • There is a hardcore long form audience but the younger audiences look for takeaways, brief news; we are always looking for ways to simultaneously cater to them without diluting our offering

P.J. George

  • Generating interest is a challenge
  • Generating interest in content generation

Ananth

  • Static presentation of knowledge on Wikipedia might be a problem
  • Some forecast and predictions could be brought in
  • Intelligent foresight
  • Answering questions, explainers, etc
  • Intelligent and context based, not in isolation (Ravi explained Wikidata here)
  • English audiences want articles and opinion pieces
  • Tamil audiences want informed opinions from a respected person
  • Wikitrends/ digitizing content as possible workable ideas
  • Visual branding is also important as recognition is based on 1) text and 2) colour. Facebook blue is a case in point
  • Partnering with government departments to upload data, whom to approach for what, FAQs, etc.
  • Wikipedia workshops for journalists

Srinivasan Ramani

  • Semmozhi song had a girl looking up Tamil Wikipedia; leaves an impression after many years (watch here at 1:55)
  • Creating a single interface for wikifiable information

P.J. George

  • Bringing government data on Wikipedia