The good, the bad, and the interesting

Last week, we sent out a survey to our email list, which is mostly made up of people who’ve given us monthly or one-off support.

We wanted to gather some information about demographics, but more importantly we wanted to know what you’re hoping to see from WikiTribune. Since we’re building the site right now, we wanted use your feedback to make sure it’s everything you imagined when you gave us your hard-earned cash.

We received loads of useful insight (thank you to everyone who took the time to respond), and in the WikiTribune spirit of transparency, we thought you’d like to see the results. They’re pretty interesting.

Stats for the survey:

Sent by email to 6,170 subscribers

Filled in by 2,589

13 questions, most of which were multiple-choice and respondents could choose more than one answer. Questions could also be skipped.

Here’s what you told us.

Question 1: Why did you choose to support WikiTribune?

The most popular answer was “I want to support quality journalism.” Which sounds like a good thing to us.

Some of the “Other” answers included:

“Wikipedia was amazing and I believe the model can ultimately work well for news. I am excited to see what you guys can create, and I believe in your ability to do so.”

“I think there is a need for a platform where people speaking minority languages can create, take part of and revive their language. Minority people in general are driven towards using the majority language, something that in the end will result in a wide-spread language death. I think the WikiTribune platform can, if developed in the right way, counteract this prospect.”

“I think advertising revenue is too impactful on media outlets. I hope that a truly open press can bring people closer together and begin to close the rift between left and right.”

2. What topics would you like to read about on WikiTribune?

Politics came out on top, with business, tech, science and the economy all scoring highly. Science in particular was very popular, possibly because (as we’ll see in a sec) lots of you want to hear about climate change.

Some of the “Other” answers included:

Climate change and the environment [many, many, many said this]

Positive/happy news [yay!]

Animals/pets, healthcare, books, cybersecurity, sociology, history, human rights, law, philosophy and religion.

3. How will you be using WikiTribune?

This fits the general trend of the web quite well: vastly more people want to consume than create. Which is probably for the best, because if we were all making things, we’d have no time to enjoy each other’s work.

Some of the “Other” answers included:

Submitting story tips and ideas

Fact checking

Commenting and sharing

4. What formats do you most want to see on WikiTribune?

Interesting that video doesn’t score highly, considering how many media outlets are currently pursuing video as “the future.” Possibly because its ad revenues are relatively high.

From these answers, it seems you’d like us to concentrate on in-depth, explainers, and investigations. Can do!

Some of the “Other” answers included:

Lots of people reiterating that they don’t want to see video (“Would appreciate NOT having videos and live broadcasts; I’d like as much information as possible to be printed and readable,” “Please no videos. Text is skimmable, quotable, easier to consume anywhere,” “If there are videos it needs to be available in HTML5, as I don’t install flash because of the vulnerabilities it introduces to one’s computer” and so on).

Updates on what happened with a story after it left the headlines

Explainers of the history and context behind current news stories

We also had lots of comments saying you’d prefer not to see opinion pieces, at least at first. That’s useful to know.

5. How often would you like to see new content on WikiTribune?

Again, the answers go against the current paradigm. Rather than the relentless appearance of the “breaking news” graphic in all of our timelines, you’d rather WikiTribune took its time and only updated once a day, or even once a week. Interesting.

Some of the “Other” answers included:

“Whatever balances quality with quantity.”

“I’d also like to see NOTHING from WikiTribune. If there’s no story, or work on a story is still ongoing, don’t sensationalise lesser events to make them appear newsworthy and fill up inches. Only publish when something matters, and if it’s a slow news week, don’t publish.”

“Please, no ‘breaking news’. Please!”

6. What sources of news do you use most often?

Not a lot of love for Yahoo News!

Some of the “Other” answers included:

Reddit

RSS feeds and readers

Podcasts and YouTube

7. What are your favourite newspapers?

Some of the “Other” answers included:

“I don’t read newspapers”

“ You should think about personalities too, rather than just papers — Ezra Klein, Ben Thompson, Tyler Cowen, Kara Swisher, etc”

Reuters, the BBC, the Intercept, Le Monde, Private Eye, and lots of local news sources

8. What gender do you identify with?

Two big problems here.

Firstly, the enormous imbalance towards the male gender. There is no reason for this: news is something that affects everyone, and WikiTribune is not inherently geared to any gender. We believe the cause of the imbalance is that our current supporters are early adopters, many of whom came via Jimmy Wales’s previous projects and Wikipedia. There’s a known gender imbalance among the Wikipedia community, and anecdotally Jimmy has noticed that a lot of his following is male.

However, we absolutely do not want WikiTribune’s audience to skew in either direction: we’d like it to be representative. So we’ll be doing lots of outreach to make sure we have an impact on all segments of society. The current WikiTribune team is 60% female.

Secondly, our phrasing here seems to have irritated some people. Comments in the ‘Other’ box included:

“There is only two answers to this question male or female (please refer to biology!). I am male.”

“The fact you even ask this question makes me not want to continue this survey. PC gone to far.”

“Male. Its sad & mad that you have to ask the question this way!”

“Male. There are only two genders, it annoys me that there is a ‘non-binary’ option here. Stupid!”

“Are you fuckin’ serious? Male. And please don’t give in to this millennial crying gender bullshit.”

These, and other respondents expressed their disappointment at WikiTribune ‘feeling that we had to’ ask about the gender identities of our readers and donors in an inclusive manner.

For the record, there was no ‘had to.’ We want to our community to be as inclusive as possible, and this is just one small step to take to ensure everyone is both welcome and represented.

9. How old are you?

Seems we’ll need to do some outreach to older sections of society.

10. In what country do you live?

Again, a very skewed response (though it may not be representative of readers, only donors). This is something we’ll be working on when we launch.

11. What was the total income of your household last year?

Again, we annoyed some people with this question. But it wasn’t there so we can advertise to you (WikiTribune will be ad-free) — it was there as a simple way to give us some idea of demographics.

We’re not going to use this information for nefarious purposes.

12. Email address

We asked if we could follow up, and if so, for your email address. Quite a few of you chose this field to give us some feedback, including our favourite, ‘not_after_you_asked_for_my_income_level@outlook.com’. Fair enough, Mr/Ms Level.

13. Is there anything else you’d like to say to Team WikiTribune?

So much useful and insightful feedback in this section. We’ve read and saved every single one, but here are a few samples of the 1000+ responses:

“Please knock this out of the park. I’m rooting for you.”

“I’m looking forward to a clean and modern design with a great reading experience (with dark mode).” [Good call on dark mode.]

“Thanks for taking our suggestions, but don’t be afraid to follow your heart if you want to try something new and unique. People want something new and different from you, so don’t let people’s usual news patterns shape your approach too much.”

Thank you all for your time reading and responding to our survey. If you have anything you want to add, please feel free to leave a response below, tweet us, leave a Facebook comment or email us.

We can’t always reply because we’ve got our hands full building the site, but we promise to read every last one. Even that one guy who sent us the song about a llama.