But how much less trustworthy is the site for breaking news than the plethora of blogs and other online news sources?

Update: We got a chance to sit and chat with Moka Pantages today and she took a moment to clarify that she was specifically referring to students using and quoting Wikipedia in research papers. We apologize for any misrepresentation of her stance. Here is her clarification:

I absolutely believe Wikipedia is a good, trustworthy source for contextual news and information and should be used by everyone, including students, as a resource. When I was asked during the panel whether or not Wikipedia should be accepted as a source for college papers, it was my opinion that, just like any other encyclopedia, I don't think it should be cited as a reference source. However, I do think it's a great starting point for students to start their research and begin to understand the topic or issue they are writing about.

Tackling Real-Time Content

Each panelist spoke about a specific case study - the New York Times' coverage of last summer's protests in Iran, for example - and discussed how they gathered crowd-sourced information and attempted to verify its authenticity. Robert Mackey, the reporter for the New York Times, gave examples of translating chants heard in YouTube videos and matching up street signs that flashed on screen with Google Maps. Once he was sure of its validity, he said, he would add it to the coverage.

"When you're sitting in an office in New York and you're trying to confirm that something was shot in Tehran that day was actually shot in Tehran that day, you're not going to be able to verify that," he said. "The idea is that it's a conversation on the web about this event."

The Newsroom Moves Online

"The media collaborated with itself and it was one big swirling newsroom on Twitter," said Guzman. "We ended up using tweets as starting points. And Twitter did end up breaking a bunch of stuff."

While SeattlePI was able to send reporters out and verify some of the information in person, how was the rest of it verified? "Common sense," she answered.

The Seattle Times, she said, had more than 500 people collaborating on Google Wave to gather information on the same story.

Wikipedia Takes On The Mumbai Terror Attacks

One particular user, Kensplanets, was a driving force behind the coverage, using breaking news from IBN.com as a source. In cases such as this one, the crowdsourcing aspect not only allows multiple points of view, but also allows aggregation from multiple points in a number of different languages and locations.

"It's not just U.S.-centric information," Pantages explained, "You have the New York Times, Reuters, Times of India - they're all there."

According to Pantages, by the end of the first day of the Wikipedia article's life, it had been edited more than 360 times, by 70 different editors referring to 28 separate sources from news outlets around the web. While this could seem like a situation rife for misdirection and misinformation, the constant discussion swirling around the creation of an article, Pantages explained, is "really similar to what you would think should be in a newsroom." Nonetheless, we still disparage Wikipedia as an untrusted source of news.

Wikipedia As News Aggregator

"There's no real-time reporting going on in Wikipedia, it's real-time aggregation," Pantages said.

So the very first level of information vetting, which happens at the reporting level, has already taken place by the time it reaches the site. Then the hundreds or thousands of editors continue to scrutinize the information, discussing edits and potential changes in the back channels. The news we read in our daily newspapers, on the other hand, is curated by only a small number of people. Surely, there is the question of qualification, but many of Wikipedia's contributors and editors are, themselves, professionals.

In contrast, we often accept news from other blogs as immediately trustworthy, while a Wikipedia article such as this one, which is transparent in its creation, its sourcing and its transmutation over time, we dismiss as flawed from conception. Today, the 2008 Mumbai Attacks article sits at more nearly 43,000 words with over 150 different sources cited and 1,245 unique editors.

While Pantages argues that "Wikipedia should not be a source, it should be a starting off point," we would have to argue the same for news media in general. In this crowd-sourced news environment we've entered, blindly consuming news and content, from any source, is an ill-advised path to follow.

With that said, if we are willing to take crowd-sourced content - whether tweets, Facebook updates, blogs, videos or whatever else - as valid sources for information about our world, then a collection of these same media as carefully poured over and curated as found in a Wikipedia article should be even more trusted, not less, than those bits on their own.

Traditional media get bits of breaking news wrong all the time, but we accept that as part of the game. To vilify Wikipedia for the same errors sets unequal standards and besides, you'll likely never see the same level of transparency in traditional media about where it went wrong. With Wikipedia, it's all laid bare for the world to see.

Is the fact that these sites produce so much content, and are quickly gaining in popularity as a result, cause for concern about the future of the Web? Will it lead to the same uniformity and lowest common denominator content that afflicts the television industry?

Answers.com Rolling in Page Views, Money

Answers.com, which we reviewed in August, garnered 56.4 Million monthly unique visitors in the United States in September (83M worldwide). For context, that puts it on a similar level as CBS Interactive (#12 with 58M uniques in U.S.) and Apple (#11 with 60M). Demand Media, which we also reviewed in August, was close behind with 52.5M uniques in September.

Answers.com announced its Q3 2009 financial results today. It made $4.99 million in revenue in that quarter, including $1.9M in September alone. The Q3 09 result was an increase of 40% compared to $3.56 million in Q3 2008. Most of the 09 revenues were from WikiAnswers, which reported $3.42 million in Q3 2009 - an increase of 75% compared to $1.96 million in Q3 2008.

WikiAnswers is the main reason for Answers.com's popularity. It is a Q&A site driven by user-generated content. And it's growing fast. Bob Rosenschein, Founder, Chairman & CEO of Answers.com, left a comment on our earlier post saying that "the growth in our traffic is almost entirely from our WikiAnswers site."

In September, WikiAnswers garnered 46.3 million U.S. unique visitors and ReferenceAnswers 21.4 million U.S. unique visitors (note there is some crossover between the two sites, hence those numbers are greater than the unduplicated total of 56.4M).

Low-Cost Content Production On A Massive Scale

There are two interesting aspects to the success of Answers.com. Firstly, it has a huge number of pages on the Web now: 38 million as of today. Much of that is user-generated content, so very low cost.

Secondly, Answers.com's page view and financial success is almost entirely created off the back of Google. Indeed, Answers.com announced recently that it has renewed its Google Services Agreement - extending its access to Google AdSense for two more years. Bob Rosenschein, CEO of Answers.com, is quoted as saying that "we earn the vast majority of our ad revenue from Google's sponsored links."

Now consider the implications of this for the future of content on the Web. The recent rapid ascensions of Answers.com and Demand Media can only really lead to one conclusion: to succeed in the content business on the Web, you should pump out hundreds of pages of content every day - preferably thousands.

Now, this is nothing new. We've known for a long time that blog success is more easily gained (gamed?) by producing far more posts per day than any one person can read. This has led to many professional blogs competing with each other on how many posts they can put up every day - usually accompanied by a slide in quality.

As well as producing as much content as possible, Answers.com and Demand Media also have a low cost structure in common with blogs. But they are taking the 'quantity rules' approach to a whole new level. This is low-cost content production done on a huge scale.

Just how much content do these two sites have on the Web? There's an easy way to find out: search Google. Here is the amount of content each has, along with some other sites for comparison:

• wikipedia.org: 56,000,000
• answers.com: 37,700,000 (of which wiki.answers.com accounts for 34,100,000)
• nytimes.com: 13,200,000
• washingtonpost.com: 12,500,000
• ehow.com: 4,850,000 (this is Demand Media's lead site)
• huffingtonpost.com: 4,740,000
• mashable.com: 210,000
• techcrunch.com: 124,000
• readwriteweb.com: 37,700

Answers.com has nearly 38 million pages of content on the Web. Much of it is discovered via Google; and monetized via Google. Wikipedia still has more content, but it is a non-profit world encyclopedia. Answers.com is a commercial company, out to make money.

Demand Media is well behind Answers.com (and Wikipedia), but there's reason to believe it will ramp up fast. In August the company told us that it produces 2,000 pieces of content per day, across its network of sites [Update, 7 Nov 09: it's now 4,000, Demand Media told us]. It also has a slick content production 'studio' system, which we will explore in our next post.

Interesting to note that Huffington Post is really the closest the blog world has to a player in this 'mega content' space - but then most of the site's content comes from aggregating it from other sites. Huffington Post has been criticized by the New York Times in particular for this practice.

Note that the New York Times and the Washington Post clearly both have a lot of content too - but they also have a lot of well-paid staff. Answers.com and Demand Media are producing content at a fraction of the price that the NYT and the WP pay for it.

The Age of Mega Content Sites - Where Is This Headed?

On the Web, traditionally success has been measured by page views. This isn't always the case - there's certainly a place for quality over quantity, a philosophy which we at ReadWriteWeb firmly believe in! But by and large, big page views usually means big revenue... or at least the promise of it (e.g. in Facebook's case).

Both Answers.com and Demand Media are onto a good thing. They have different approaches - Answers.com is largely user-generated content combined with Wikipedia and other sources; Demand Media has created a low-cost content factory, by employing thousands of freelancers.

Google is largely keeping both companies in business - it is the source of most of their traffic (because a lot of it is reference or resource content) and certainly in Answers.com's case it provides the bulk of its revenue.

I can't help but think that the rapid rise of these two companies may be bad news for the Web. If a small number of companies come to dominate a content market, usually blandness and lowest common denominator fare follows. The network television and radio markets in almost any country in the world are evidence of that. Likewise, if you search Google for a reference article and the first page of results is littered with Answers.com and Demand Media articles, is that crowding out the real topic experts?

Are these mega content sites a good or bad thing for the Web? Is quality taking too much of a back seat to quantity? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

From parody sites being taken too seriously to fake news items somehow ending up on major news websites, the two tackle a wide spectrum of new media and industrial media issues. They also get to chat about the legitimacy and credentials of new media journalists and how many social media users have ended up being the first to report or broadcast important news in recent months.

Special thanks to Christopher Munton for camera/audio/editing work.

The conversation wasn't high tech, but it was stone-cold realistic. Here are a few videos from that panel; you'll hear on-air NBC affiliate reporters talk about how they've incorporated Twitter and Facebook to engage audiences and get leads on new stories, and you'll hear local bloggers talk about how they fit into the scheme of things.

He inspired a fellow reporter, Rachel DePompa, to start her own Twitter account. Here, she shares how that affected her reporting:

A local lifestyle mag shared how social media affected site traffic:

The conversation turned back to the first NBC reporter, who talked about how social media gave his audience more personal insight and a deeper connection with him:

The panel had some interesting comments on on-air tweets during newscasts:

And finally, the editor for RVAMag told an interesting story about a truly hardcore monetized Twitter account:

All in all, we learned tonight how traditional media are slowly but surely incorporating social media in their reporting, using it both for broadcast and discovery as well as personal interaction. Best of all, this conversation took place within the Social Media Club environment. All parties involved were intent on "getting it right" as all forms of media evolve.

GateHouse, one of the largest publishers of community newspapers in the United States, filed a copyright infringement suit last month claiming that the Globes' new local Web sites are using material without permission. The New York Times Co. is the parent company of The Boston Globe.

Catherine Mathis, a spokeswoman for The New York Times last month said the company believes GateHouse's claims are "without merit."

"Boston.com's local pages, like hundreds of other news sites, aggregate headlines and snippets of relevant stories published on the Web. They link back to the originating site where the interested user can read the entire article," Mathis said in a statement on Dec. 22. "Far from being illegal or improper, this practice of linking to sites is common and is familiar to anyone who has searched the Web. It is fair and benefits both Web users and the originating site."

Jeff Jarvis, who has been following the case on his blog BuzzMachine sees this as a danger to journalism. Many people would agree. "Gatehouse should be sucking Boston.com's toes begging for more links, not siccing lawyers on them," writes Jarvis in a post last month. "The move is not just brain dead but dangerous, for it threatens the ecology of links that I believe will be the underpinning of news online. Links are how original journalism will be supported."

If you're not familiar with the case, you can get some background by reading the two versions of the story. Boston.com's has published its take here, and GateHouse here.

Photo Credit: Dezz

UPDATE: Case settled out-of court

Thanks Matt and Jeffrey for pointing out the case has been settled. You can read the Agreement here (PDF). It was settled out-of-court, which may be fortunate or unfortunate depending on how you look at it. As it was an out-of-court settlement, there will be no judicial precedent set.

In M&A transactions, most of them occurred in the consumer sector of online media - 329 transactions, representing 46.5% of the total transaction volume in 2008.

The 2008 reported M&A deal value by sector:

• Consumer - $6.2 billion (36.7%);
• Business - $4.8 billion (28.4%);
• Mobile - $592 million (3.5%);
• Enabling - $2.5 billion (14.6%); and
• Commerce - $2.8 billion (16.7%).

In terms of venture capital, in 2008 $3.5 billion flowed into all sectors of media according to Peachtree. This was a 22% increase over the $2.9 billion in capital raised in 2007 in this sector. Peachtree stated that the "Enabling" category had the largest increase in the amount of capital raised, up 124% with $892 million in 2008. The Mobile sector also saw big gains in investment capital, with $341 million in investment capital in 2008 - a whopping 488% increase over the $58 million raised by that sector in 2007.

The consumer category was the biggest, with 48% of capital raises.

The top five sectors in terms of volume of transactions (not reported deal value) for equity raises in 2008 were as follows:

• Video & Online Games - 59 capital raise transactions;
• Social Networking - 57 capital raise transactions;
• Web Applications/Enabling/IT - 47 capital raise transactions;
• Mobile - 35 capital raise transactions; and
• Blogging/User Generated - 27 capital raise transactions.

It'll be interesting of course to see how the M&A and investment sector pans out in 2009. There were 27 capital raises in 2008 in the Blogging/User Generated sector alone, and I can't imagine there being that many in 2009. Tell us your thoughts in the comments.

In some journalism schools around the US, it just might be. Would that really be so bad? Though many may disagree with us, we think there is some merit to teaching new media in journalism and other schools.

The world is changing, media education has probably always needed to change and this point in history offers some exciting opportunities for educators and students.

Making The Changes

Old media is slower, less compelling and more expensive than many emerging media online. It's also more professional, often of higher quality and generally easier to monetize. The same could be said of old vs internet new in almost any industry where new players are fast taking leadership positions they would not have been able to access so easily without the technologies in question.

We think the video short series Good Morning, Internet (right) captures some parts of this dilemma well.

What will the future of media work look like, for participants old and new? Good places to look for detailed guesses include the Poynter Institute, Kansas Proffesor of Digital Ethnography Dr. Michael Wesch and blogging media critic Jeff Jarvis (see Jarvis's post on Editor 2.0 in particular).

Can You Teach New Media In School?

The new media world of blogging, RSS, tagging, wikis, podcasting and more is all so new that there are hardly any established standards or best practices well established yet. That said, there are definitely skill sets that make a world of difference in a practitioner's efficacy.

Can those skill sets be taught in school? Most people we talked to said that schools could do well to facilitate learning experiences regarding new media. We believe, however, that there are large amounts of tangible information that can be transmitted to students in any setting that will enable them to have far more meaningful experiments in learning.

Drop a sucker in SecondLife and they'll be an avatar for a day, teach them how to learn about and navigate to the most interesting events going on there and they'll...well, you get the idea.

Update: A number of people have responded in comments, arguing that it's not the skills that need to be taught, it's knowledge about the issues. Ethics, history, ethos, etc. While that's all very important, the skills themselves are not trivial, either. As we responded in comments:

it's one thing to figure out how to use social media tools, another to learn how to use them powerfully in a professional context. I see that there are a number of people here saying it's "issues" that educators need to focus on, but I believe that proficiency in the use of the technologies themselves warrants extensive education as well.

For example, journalists should know how to run a feed through a filter and then monitor it by IM/SMS. Just knowing different ways to do this is material enough for one short class session. Strategic considerations in doing it better than a competitor does are material enough for another session.

Journalists should know how to navigate Wikipedia, reading edit history effectively and understanding participants in conversations there in context. I'd love to spend one class session learning about that. Ethics and case studies could surely be one part of it, but the mechanics of advanced use of these tools are complex enough that teaching them is a good idea.

Can that information be transmitted to students in a school setting, though? Students may be better off spending an hour watching all the 5 minute Social Media in Plain English videos from Common Craft.

Academia tends to be woefully behind in almost everything it teaches. Experience in the private sector tends to be a faster and more effective method of learning almost anything. Hard sciences may be the exception.

The internet is changing faster than almost anything in this world, so expecting academics to be capable of offering timely teaching in this field may lead to serious disappointment. That may be shortchanging a lot of hard working teachers fired up about the web, though.

There is Hope

Looking at what Dr. Michael Wesch teaches college students, what the incredible Vicki Davis manages to do with Elementary school students and the internet and what popular education blogger Stephen Downes advises - it is clear that there is some powerful potential for teaching new media.

Nonprofit technologist Amy Sample Ward, who graduated with a Major in New Media from Valparaiso University in Indiana, explains what one new media teacher, Milan Andrejevich, was able to help her learn.

For new media 'courses' to be successful, in my opinion, the 'teaching' and 'learning' need to be synonymous. Experiential learning and project-based assignments are really the only way to provide a space to learn and discuss new media tools. For example, a project that I had in one of my new media classes, was to take the regional newspaper's website, and re-vamp it be an actual community space using new media tools for story-telling, community building, and up-to-the-minute input. We even had the chance to present our changes to the newspaper staff. It doesn't get much more 'real' than that; and made us all focus on the biggest lesson of new media application: it needs to fit, not just be cool.

There's certainly no substitute for experience, but there are some basic skills that new practitioners can benefit from being taught by someone else. We're sure there will be a lot of bad New Media departments popping up in colleges around the world, but we believe there is hope that many others will be worth attending, too.

Photo at top: "School Rules" by Flickr user zzellers