Women's International Perspective
www.thewip.com Accessed Nov 6 2008
Self-described and according to the site, the Women's International Perspective strives “to publish relevant and engaging world news, opinion and commentary written by women for everyone.” It features stories from around the world, written by women from many different countries and backgrounds.
Extent of Community Involvement:
The WIP site has enabled comments on all of its stories. You must have an account with WIP in order to leave a comment, but the option is there. However, there is very little commentary on most of the stories. The most comment-populated story I saw, “Peace Activist Cindy Sheehan Seeks to Unseat Nancy Pelosi for Betraying the Constitution” had seven comments.
The WIP does have a section that encourages user commentary more than any other site I have seen so far: the WIP Talk blog. Anyone with a WIP account can write a blog entry, which will then be available for the world to see and comment on. This is a brand of citizen journalism that many sites do not dip into due to the great amount of content moderation that must go on with such an undertaking. However, the WIP is a smaller organization, and may be able to moderate its community blog without issue. The WIP site has options for community input, but they are not well populated. Grade: B
Format of Stories:
The WIP is strictly a written story site. There are no available videos, and the only photos are included within the stories. While it is a small organization, due to the focus on international women's journalism it would be interesting to see some photojournalism and video broadcasting. However, the main idea of the site is to proliferate written journalism. The site's credibility as a news site is in question because of the lack of news story multimedia. It is one thing to read about the things that are happening, but it would be an enhancement to the journalistic experience to have different kinds of media for user viewing. Grade: D
Updates:
The WIP appears to update with stories every day. Because of the smaller number of journalists that work on the site, it does not have as many new stories as larger sites, but it does update with new content. Writers do not seem to report on beats. They appear to write on things that appeal to them most, such as Natalie Hart's story “Palestinian Refugees Find a New Life in Chile.” Hart is, from her descriptive paragraph below her story, a student focusing in Arabic and Spanish influences, and is studying abroad. This situational journalism style has worked well for the WIP, and the site normally has multiple updates per day from its abroad writers. Grade: B
Editorial System:
The WIP site is a small site which is affiliated with no large corporation. Therefore, they have a very small editing team-- only three women. Katharine Daniels is the executive editor, Sarah McGowan is the Features and Photo Editor, and Aralena Malone Le-Roy is the news editor. This small team runs and manages content from a large number of contributors all over the world. This is a massive undertaking for only three people, and throws the credibility of the site content into question. Three people would naturally have a difficult time correctly editing, running feedback on, and reading the many stories that come in from the writers, and it is a question of veracity within stories that makes me lower the credibility score here. With such a small team, double checking information is surely almost impossible. The editors do state that they collaborate with other editors and writers, and some writers may function as editors, but this is not immediately obvious. Grade: D
Blogs:
The WIP has no blog section for its writers, as much of the writers' work is subjectively based and on subjects that the writers choose themselves. However, the WIP Talk section is a massive blog for the whole community to add to, and should not go unconsidered. However, with such availability for posting, as well as the time spent editing and posting the actual site stories, I wonder how well the editors can moderate the blog posts. In all, the WIP might function as a large blog-post-gathering site for a world of female writers rather than a broad-spectrum news site. While the news that is reported is broad-spectrum, it is content chosen by the writers, and not necessarily content that is chosen by the editors to cover all the largest news stories. Grade: D
Final Thoughts:
The WIP is a very interesting study in collective journalism. Through gathering stories from a wide variety of writers and backgrounds, the organization has formed a generally large-news and humanitarian efforts site. The issues lie in the editorial section, where the small number of editors may not adequately cover the amount of fact-checking and writer management needed. Final Grade: C