What Wales will find (and I’ve talked with him about this) is that unlike Wikipedia the news world isn’t suffering for lack of content. Specifically, every single thing you could find on the WikiTribune page you could find in another place, probably written just as well, and still available for free.
WikiTribune needs to develop an edge. “We’re accurate” isn’t an edge, because most people consider news accurate and authoritative. “We’re fair” doesn’t matter, because the people that think news is inherently biased have a (probably biased) news source that they consider unbiased. They don’t appear to be taking a “We’re focused on only important stuff” or any of the other ways they could differentiate.
The power of crowdsourcing can/should be to produce types of news that for-profit news doesn’t do as well. Deep, investigative stuff that’s hard and expensive to do if you’re paying people for it. But that’s hard, and not many people click on it. Once you’ve done all that hard work, someone at NBC will take your research and write an article about it, tapping their enormous audience, and link back to you as a source (hey thanks!) Most people will never click.
There’s very little incentive to perform the type of journalism that’s actually needed, and even if you create it you don’t necessarily benefit from it.
In that context war and combat were the big sellers and got the most coverage, because you just had to be in the right spot at the right time. There is little or not investigation. The best news coming out of there had nothing to do with combat action, but rather things that demanded real investigation. The hard work of journalism. These stories were extremely rare, in comparison.
The other major issue is allowing an audience to dictate your subject matter, which is my interpretation of crowdsourcing. I would say this is the quickest way to defeat your primary mission of objectivity and shortest path to bias. The big challenge here is how to determine what qualifies as a story worth publishing, particularly for an international audience.
One way to limit bias is to disallow opinion pieces and editorials. Fox News is, on occasion, a great source of journalism, but journalism doesn't drive its ratings. Editorial pundits do, and a clear bias is the result.
Also, their bias is not out of a need to make money. It's not incidental. It's an open, well-funded attempt to push the country to the right, and it worked.
> Also, their bias is not out of a need to make money. It's not incidental. It's an open, well-funded attempt to push the country to the right, and it worked.
I completely disagree. The pundits make money from advertising sales. The greater their following the more they can charge for ad time slots. Fox claims to be the highest rated and most watched televised news. It isn't about setting a political mandate. It is all about making money.
Moderates were pushed to the right after Obama's time in office just as they were pushed to the left after Bush's second term. Now, it seems, many voters are being pushed to the left since Trump has entered office. There isn't a conspiracy here.
EDIT: Rupert Murdock was a Hillary Clinton supporter.
Isn't that inevitable when your main revenue source is in-article advertising?
This. I subscribe to the New York Times. Not because I believe they cover everything the best (I go to sports blogs and r/cfb for college football), and not even because they cover the things I'm very interested in pretty well.
I subscribe, because on an average day, what they've chosen to cover and to cover well, generally appeals to me. This includes all the many, many things I am not aware of or give a high priority to on an average day, until I see it on the front page of the NYT.
This isn't at all an argument that the NYT is better than every other outlet there. First of all, there are places that beat out the NYT on some days -- and conversely, days when the NYT has done something abysmal.
But the cost of finding that optimal outlet (an argument for why personal optimization in this area has highly diminishing returns could be its own topic) -- which would be in addition to the cost of time that I spend consuming news and commentary -- isn't worth if relative to the NYT's success rate.
Note I'm never restricted to the NYT on any day, of course. I'm arguing for why I'm fine with having the habitual inclination (and the recurring credit card payment) to make the NYT my primary choice on an average day.
That answer is really the fundamental issue. OP Mizza had 2 paragraphs about "process" and "tools" because he believes the barrier to investigative journalism is the lack of a collaboration/communications hub. He wrote:
>When it comes to massively collaborative investigation, the key thing is _process_, not product. [...] I think in terms of what is needed of tools to be developed [...] cobbled together using Google Docs, Facebook and Slack
It's misleading to think that a technical software solution such as having programmers develop a slack+github+crypto-email hub will unleash investigative journalism.
The real key issue is the funding, not the web communication platforms. Another commenter nodded in agreement with Mizza and said we need more "PBS Frontline". Well, that show is funded[1] by viewer donations and grants from billionaires' philanthropic foundations. (e.g. John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation oversees a ~$6 billion endowment.)
Can WikiTribune can attract billionaires to write checks and pay for investigative journalism? We don't know yet. Maybe the only realistic path is for WikiTribune to start modestly with their supporters paying $15/month[2] for "fact-checked" and "evidence-based" journalism and when they build enough of a reputation, billionaires will open their wallets to pay for expensive months-long investigative work.
If applying for grants from philanthropic foundations (like PBS Frontline has done) is the wrong funding model for investigative journalism, I'd rather we discuss alternative ways to pay journalists instead of software tools.
Yes, new collaborative software tools can help smooth over some editing workflows -- but that's not the real problem.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/about-us/our-funders/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikitribune#Business_model
In fact the central genius of it, and Wikipedia, is that it's basically outside the commercial realm, and therefore at least theoretically free of most of the distortions the profit motive creates in journalism.
Hence they don't really need an "edge" either, but if they did, they do have one: "We're a non-profit." And/or, "You wrote it." (The public, that is.)
It's basically a copy of Wikipedia where instead of "no primary sources" they'll likely toggle it over to "all primary sources" (or mostly). Though actually I wonder why they didn't just keep it as part of Wikipedia itself, but maybe that's the reason right there.
And it's even harder if you are not a well known entity that can open doors. 60 Minutes, NYTimes, WSJ etc the usual suspects are a well oiled machine of access. Don't think for a second (I know this wasn't your point btw.) that a nobody even with money and talent can duplicate that advantage.
I think/hope you might be mistaken here. People used to think UX wasn't a feature people would pay for, and Apple proved them wrong.
The existing "Wikipedia = relatively unbiased, and accurate" brand might make a big difference if WikiTribune can deliver.
You have papers with excellent track records for accurate reporting getting blasted as fake news constantly.
TBH same paper can have a track record of accurate reporting in some things, and be wildly biased, inaccurate and unreliable in other things. It is easy to find ones that are all-around bad, it's not hard to find ones that are good at something and bad at something, but finding ones that are universally good... that's challenging. I wonder which ones you think have excellent record, never reporting anything bad or inaccurate.
One paper that does a great job in my opinion is "Die Zeit". I am not familiar with the American media landscape and thus a equivalent, however.
They aren't often though, because they stake their reputation on being accurate.
Bias is harmful, but I think the WaPo and NYT are a much more acceptable level of bias then say, Fox.
Decision makers of any import have no shortage of high quality information. The availability of information is not a significant limiting factor on good decisions by powerful people. For example: Trump has the greatest information resources in the known world at his command yet he makes shitty decisions basically nonstop.
A shortage of information is not the social problem of today. The big social problem today is the selection of information. That has more to do with tribal trust and culture than the information itself.
For all the shortcomings of Wikipedia (and there are many), it is a source of information that is widely trusted and used across tribal boundaries. A "news" organization that achieves the same thing would be good.
There are plenty of people and orgs doing great investigations. The problems are getting them eyeballs, and getting past the trust barrier.
Who knows if Wikitribune will do it.
Working in a Fortune 500 company it is amazing the kind of information we have available for "Powerful People". I also feel like more and more of that information is available to everyone, the difference is that "Powerful People" have the money and resources to pay teams to sift through, organize, and present the information in an actionable way. Companies, Powerful People, and Governments spend tons of resources on trying to understand the information. Data is cheap, understanding the data is extremely expensive.
Information is out there for the taking, but it is useless in the raw state it starts in.
I read an interesting story a few weeks ago about how the CIA has entire teams of cartographers whose job is to show data on information on maps in a way that tells a story. That is their full time job to work with researchers and analysts to create "pretty" representations of data that are informative and easy to digest.
I think data is only interesting because of the stories it tells. But picking a story out data can be time consuming and expensive and prone to errors. If WikiTribune enables experts and laypeople to collaborate in a productive way then I think it will be an amazing service.
I have lots of thoughts on all of this and am very very very interested to see where it goes. I really hope this is as great as it has the potential to be.
So, really high quality information for decision makers in relevant fields?
To some extent, the OP surely meant getting professionals access to proper data, but what I would call "general population" news should still be of high quality and integrity. And we the people are decision makers, through public opinion and through formal voting. So having journalists dig into issues and present facts substantiated through research and proof is critical.
I think you and OP agree more than you disagree.
So why doesn't everybody do that? Some people just don't have time, but for a lot of people, they actively reject accurate, useful information that is available to them, for free. Why? That's an important question.
We're not lacking in investigations of global warming. We're lacking in trust in those investigations. Shoveling more information at those people is not going to solve the problem. The messenger matters! It matters more than the message, for a lot of people; it seems like a growing number of people.
So, that's why a new messenger might be good, even if they're not funding substantial new investigations.
[1] For no marginal cost beyond what it costs to access the Internet in general.
"People who need to make decisions" perhaps, rather than "decision makers", which is a loaded terms.
Most specifically: people who are consuming "news" information because it is relevant to their lives, not because it is just part of their continuous feed of info-tainment.
Even if you support the goals, you would be hard pressed to argue that his decision and enactment process was ham-fisted and half-cocked, leading to many of the legal challenges being able to hold water. Knee-jerk responses, supporting statements that belied the goal ("this is not a travel ban" - "today we are putting a travel ban into place"), and so on.
Effective decisions are reasoned and well planned, not shot from the hip, which you could argue many of his decisions are, even removing the -substance- of the decision or the topic from the equation.
The ones where the Supreme Court essentially agreed with him, at least partially? I'd say he got what he wanted, even if with a delay. The goal was curtailing immigration from "bad" countries, and I think that has been achieved by him. And he also consolidated his base by showing that the other side will oppose what Trump's side considers fighting terrorism by any means, including legal tactics that look very questionable to a common person, like arguments "if other person did it, it is legal, but if Trump does it, it's illegal".
> leading to many of the legal challenges being able to hold water
There would be legal challenges in any case, and given how many judges are from the opposing party, at least some of them would succeed at least temporarily. It's unavoidable in any case - what's the point then taking it slow? It would just give the opposition more time to stall.
Could he do it in a softer and more gradual manner? Of course he could, but which one of his goals would that promote? His goals are curtailing immigration from "bad" countries and showing his base that he's ready to act on that and to deliver results. I don't see how soft approach would serve those goals.
He did it even better than you're saying, there's a missing piece that's almost never mentioned: The list of countries in the travel ban were identified in 2015 and early 2016 during the Obama administration, and already had restrictions due to being the most likely sources of terrorism.
Inconvenient truths like that are something I'd be concerned about being kept off of something like WikiTribune by squatters.
If you're going to go back and rest your argument on what the Obama administration did, then you still have to explain why Trump needed to do what he tried to do.
Calling back to the Obama adminstration's actions makes it harder, not easier to justify Trump's EO. You have to explain why the Obama administration's actions were insufficient--which Trump staff did not even try to do. They just asserted that he had the authority to do it, regardless of any proof it was necessary.
A balanced view of Trump's pre-election promises and his ability to deliver on them is decidedly mixed, especially on the bigger promises like health and the wall:
> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37982000
This is not really a good list - e.g. Trump never really promised "Ban on Muslims" - it said once something that could be interpreted this way, and walked it back very quickly. And, as you know, Supreme Court did agree with him on travel restrictions (which aren't "ban on Muslims").
Also, saying all illegal immigrants "have to go" is not the same as saying he will deport all of them, let alone in the first year. It's like politician saying "murder is wrong" and then BBC would quote statistics of murder still happening as evidence of broken campaign promise. One should distinguish ideal picture as a statement and realistic possible picture as a policy.
He also never promised to "ditch NATO", not even close. He made some sounds that how the alliance is arranged is obsolete, but walked most of it back, and what remained was about how much money each member pays.
He did not make any specific promise on prosecuting Clinton. Even BBC notes the most he said is "fresh investigation", not prosecution. Investigation and prosecution are very different things. Of course, many Trump supporters would like to see Clinton prosecuted, but that doesn't mean Trump promised anything specific there.
Overall, BBC interpretation sounds very distorted, treating genuine campaign promises (like Obamacare reform) and random campaign rhetoric or random interview phrasethat was subsequently either substantially modified or completely abandoned by the election time as same kind of promise and rating them alike. This is a shoddy job.
Of course, he could be playing 10-dimensional chess and cleverly be seeking more to wreak long-term chaos and disorder than to advance the superficially apparent agenda his actions seem to be aimed at. In which case you'd be right.
What is said many times doesn't correspond to the real agenda. Take healthcare. Possibly a good number of politicians who crow about the evils of Obamacare really don't want it to fail. Otherwise it's going to cost their local districts money even though it's (conceptually) wildly unpopular with the constituency. So gosh darn it, they are trying really hard to overturn that evil communist plot but the pesky Democrats just keep blocking them at every turn!
With Trump who knows. He is a wildcard. It's hard to say what the real agenda is but it's probably not what he is verbalizing. Or if it is he isn't a real politician yet :)
> Trump doesn't make "shitty" decisions
I don't even know if that counts as a goal or achievement. There was a seat to fill so it was filled. I guess depends how you look at it.
Maybe pulling out of TPP? That was a major issue with Bernie supporters and was one the first things he did. Even then I remember being on /r/politics afterward and seeing comments about how "Maybe TPP is good and we should support it now that Trump took action against it".
Externally maybe making progress with ISIS? There was a pretty significant reduction of its territory. I was always baffled how during the last 8 years the rise of ISIS was portrayed as a complete surprise the US government, CIA just "couldn't believe" how fast it spread. Wonder how hard they worked to stop it, if even an amateur TV personality could make relatively quick progress of it in a short time.
Many supporters would say economy. It's hard to deny that the stock market has been doing pretty well. And, yes, the argument is that presidents don't really have that much influence on long term trends, which I agree with. However, in the PR domain, I imagine had the stock market gone down by the same amount, there would be no end to articles claiming "look what Trump" did.
Consumer confidence is allegedly at a 17 year high. At least Bloomberg says so https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-31/u-s-consu.... Kind of like the stock market thing, who's the president probably doesn't matter, but had it gone the opposite way there would be a lot of talk how the president caused it go down.
As they say, give the devil what belongs to the devil. Trump should be criticized and scrutinized. But it has to be an intelligent and effective criticism. It is rather disappointed to see things like how many scoops of ice-cream he ate, or how long he shook Macron's hand, or that he is stupid and has orange hair. A lot of the media has been reduced to those kind of stories.
They follow the same plan as the Obama administration: Build up Iraqi political authority and military effectiveness until they are ready to both drive out ISIS themselves, and to maintain military and political control of the areas on the long term. Under Obama, they built up the Iraqi army from the one that fled ISIS en mass to one that could fight long, difficult battles and hold ground permanently, and they built up the Iraqi central government's political authority. Under Obama were the first few victories and tests of the rebuilt Iraqi army, and they continued moving forward under the Trump administration.
It's based on a lesson the U.S. (re)learned in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars: Driving out the enemy militarily is only the first step, and not at all sufficient. Then someone must establish political authority, including military control over the area and its people, or the enemy will simply return to claim it themselves - which is what happened with ISIS. The most famous dictum in military affairs is that 'war is politics by other means'. (Also, it makes more sense for the Iraqis to die for the nation of Iraq than the Americans.)
It's very hard for a foreign occupier to establish that political authority and maintain military control - imagine the prospect of the Iraqi army, no matter what their resources, trying to establish political authority in your town - and it requires lives and massive expenditures over decades, more than the U.S. is willing to invest (thankfully). Note that even the great historical empires used locals to run their foreign territories - overseen, of course, by an imperial governor and garrison.
> They follow the same plan as the Obama administration:
It depends how its executed. I would imagine the general outline would be the same, unless we switch to boots on the ground, or not using drones and so on, but sometimes it is the tweaks and adjustments that make a difference. At least looking at the territory it controlled, there was a much faster contraction there under Trump. Maybe Obama's plan finally had come to fruition and territory contraction coincided exactly with Trump's taking over the presidency, but that's a bit of a stretch I think.
Moreover, as much as we can say Obama had the same plan, it's good to remember that ISIS also grew on his watch. I don't believe that something like ISIS took us completely by surprise as government officials claimed. US had its fingers in the pie in the region since the Cold War, we might not have directly supported it, but we knew about it and maybe even allowed it grow, in order to destabilize Syria.
Regarding the U.S.: If we talk about what 'could be' or 'maybe' or what we 'imagine', as the parent comment does, we can make any claim. Based on what the military and experts have consistently said and on the facts on the ground: It's the same plan, working as designed; ISIS' loss of territory did not coincide with Trump taking office, it began in 2016.
> ISIS also grew on his [Obama's] watch
That has no implications for Trump's effectiveness.
> we knew about it [ISIS] and maybe even allowed it grow, in order to destabilize Syria.
Starting form the fundamentals of international relations (as I understand them), as the global, status quo superpower the U.S. wants stability globally, which protects the U.S.-led international order; ISIS is a threat to global stability. The U.S. has particularly supported stability in that region, to secure the global oil supply (essential to global stability and the U.S. economy) and also to protect the region's status quo U.S.-supported power structure, based in recent decades on the Saudis, Israel and Egypt. The U.S., by its actions, clearly prefers Assad to ISIS: The Americans even have allied in places with enemies including the Iranians (including in Iraq), Russians, Assad, and even other small fundamentalist groups against ISIS.
That doesn't mean ISIS took the U.S. by surprise, however. ISIS began in Syria, outside of the U.S.'s sphere at the time, and then spread to Iraq. The U.S.'s options in Iraq at the time were limited. The Iraqi government refused to allow U.S. forces in the country (that was the deal agreed to by Bush and executed by Obama, withdrawing U.S. forces). Also, the Iraqi army may have been expected to put up a fight instead of simply fleeing when faced with what were (IIRC) inferior forces.
Of course it does. If Obama was supporting and involved in propping up Syrian "rebels" in the area, with groups of people and equipment switching sides, he was not effectively 100% committed to wiping it out. So the strategy was the same, but pumping resources fighting Assad in the region on another hand was undermining that strategy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/27/world/middleeast/cia-arms...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-rebe...
http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/12/politics/syria-arming-rebels/i...
> The U.S., by its actions, clearly prefers Assad to ISIS:
Right but it only took until Trump was elected to stop feeding "rebels" fighting Assad. Well at least that's what the press releases say. So U.S. actions were a schizophrenic and certainly don't say anything "clearly".
> That doesn't mean ISIS took the U.S. by surprise,
Obama says it did http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/07/politics/isis-surprise-obama/i... . He blames CIA backhandedly:
"The ability of ISIL to initiate major land offensives that took Mosul, for example, that was not on my intelligence radar screen," [Obama told Zakaria]
I've never seen anyone with expertise say that arms sent to the rebels significantly helped ISIS, or that supporting the rebels undermined the fight against ISIS. I did see plenty that indicated that the support of the rebels was ineffective and/or insufficient.
>> That doesn't mean ISIS took the U.S. by surprise,
> Obama says it did
You said in the GGP, "I don't believe that something like ISIS took us completely by surprise", and I was allowing that you might be right.
And this doesn't even get into his goals whose impossibility is obvious to people with real information--like getting Mexico to pay for the wall, or boosting the U.S. economy by starting trade wars, or getting China to put a leash on North Korea's nuclear program, or growing jobs in the coal power industry, etc.
I feel that they have a really meaningful and important role in the political debate today.
It has come under its own criticisms, but the effort and philosophy is pretty laudable.
That's the big problem: it's that easy to delegitimize something in the eyes of enough people that a competing narrative, regardless of its factual value, can be put in competition with it.
One approach I'd like to see for this is the use of ethereum-style smart contracts to validate documents (and that it should be as obvious and reliable as a creative commons icon) and collections of source material and the semantic graph that connects them to be public, so that it's much harder for people to dismiss it by attacking the summary node that merely describes the relationship between them (the 'news story'). Textual narratives are stories about relationships and chronologies, but stories can be invalidated by attacking the teller. What we need are public shareable metadata and a protocol for linking disparate pieces of metadata together.
People don't want to spend time knowing how all that shit works, the same way they just want to be able to recognize authentic cash notes in a physical wallet without having to know anything about specie currency or financial economics.
You need to find a new hammer.
Hear, hear! I open the project and first two articles I read are about what Trump tweeted and how everybody is reacting. I can find that kind of stuff in literally every other news site. What I'd like to see is something deeper, more researched, more illuminating, something that makes me understand the world better, think about things I've never thought before, expose facts and connections I've not seen before. If it will be yet another log of what Trump tweeted and how everybody else reacted, I already have more than enough of those, not worth the effort for me to read another one and for the team to spend time to write another one.
Wikipedia went to wow because people (and machines) produced deep content. This suggests that deep reporting can be crowd sourced...I mean what but journalism is the Wikipedia article on the Trump presidency? The reporting just doesn't play out across static content on multiple sites. Consider the 2014 Romanian Presidential Election. [1] It might be considered authoritative reporting. The long process and continuous refinement of that reporting is hard to distinguish from investigative journalism in any way other than it not being in pursuit of a headline [2].
WikiTribune has the possibility of delivering news without mass market appeal precisely because Wikipedia more or less does it already. To the degree that the distinction between encyclopedias and newspapers come down to printing technology and the historical business models associated with those differences then the Wikipedia business model for journalism may be viable.
[1]: I picked it arbitrarily, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_presidential_election...
[2]: And cynically being published despite the lack of titillation worthy of a headline.
In fact, lately I've found the notion of "slow news" appealing: i.e. weekly (or even monthly) presentations of important news stories, increasing the SNR and total depth of the news I'm consuming.
I struggle with what the appropriate mindset should be for someone undertaking journalism. Is a pre-existing belief in the legitimacy of various institutions/governments helpful or harmful to the process? Is respect/deference to officials, wealthy people, celebrities, etc., helpful or harmful?
Because there is so much demand for entertainment (of which partisan reporting is one form) I am really not sure how much actual demand there is for truthful, in-depth coverage.
The choice of what to cover entails a view foisted upon readers that some things are more worthy of our attention than others. So how can a journalism organization be upfront about the inevitable gaps in coverage so that readers will know to ask for coverage and know that the org is aware of the topic but lacks resources to cover it.
For instance, a story about the issues going on in Syria and no story about decaying highway infrastructure might entail the belief that one is important and the other is not important. So I think the ideal news organization would locate every story on some sort of content map that defined exactly where it fit into the organization's broader mission.
A story about Syria might be filed under "America's foreign engagements" and a story about decaying highways could be filed under "Tracking America's infrastructure quality and infrastructure projects". Personally I would love to see lots of coverage of infrastructure, as it is one of the few ways we can hold local, state and national governments accountable for one of their most important responsibilities.
But the idea of a front page that reflects (only) everything that is important that day is where (I think) the biases start to creep in.
Anyway, sorry about the digression, just wanted to express my appreciation for the parent comment.
I'd like to point out that this is meant to be a global news source so the fact that America is involved would hardly be the most significant aspect of a story about Syria.
It's funny how Canadians never get upset at this the way other countries do.
Increasingly, I feel the web annotations standard might point a way forward because it offers people a way to share information about content that's not under control of the publisher. Of course, this will generate a flood of low-quality garbage of the sort found on conspiracy sites, but it also allows for the creation of federated graphs that point back to primary sources, and my bet is that structural integrity will eventually count for more than startle value.
I tend to agree.
One thing I'd like to see is more of a focus on trends not events.
You should link to a 'demo' thread from the homepage. Maybe an example interview or discourse with a politician. This would be the best way to sell the idea.
There is a page of "Featured" exchanges, some of which include:
Fresenius Kabi confirming they are still acquiring a company even after its founder and board chair were arrested on a narcotics trafficking RICO:
https://www.pubmail.io/mail/thread/OF49EC78E8.C30281B7-ON862...
AmerisourceBergen confirming they paid out sales commissions based on the sale of opioid drugs, and changing that policy after the 60 minutes exposé:
https://www.pubmail.io/mail/thread/20171105013005.29768.F72D...
Some of the stuff is more trivial but needs to be done for completeness sake, like the WashPo denying payoff rumours:
https://www.pubmail.io/mail/thread/20171111020538.56788.2671...
Some of the stories are in silence - Cardinal Health and McKesson simply don't respond to any inquiries at all.
When it comes to investigative work, I think that the "story" is often in the aggregate rather than any one specific detail.
The thing we need _less_ of is "news". The thing we need more of is investigation. Even before the digital age, "news" was a way to sell paper with a mark-up. Now it's a way to sell eyeballs to advertisers. The fact that the fourth estate emerged was just a lucky byproduct of the "news" industry, even though it is the foundation of the modern respect for the role that journalism plays in society.
When it comes to massively collaborative investigation, the key thing is _process_, not product. Even though it has been tried unsuccessfully or semi-successfully many times (ex, old school WikiLeaks, OpenWatch, WikiNews, MuckRock), I still think that this is absolutely the problem that should be focused on.
The product of this investigation shouldn't be an article with mass market appeal, but really high-quality information that is useful for decision makers in relevant fields.
I think in terms of what is needed of tools to be developed and used, the keys are: transparency, data science, and communications process. Various initiatives have been successfully cobbled together using Google Docs, Facebook and Slack, but these are usually projects with finite scope and a handful of participants. Nothing has ever come close to the kind of impact and reach that Wikipedia has had.
I currently run the service https://pubmail.io as a tool for investigators and reporters to be more transparent in their email correspondence. Additional tools I'd like to see are tools for aggregating, combining and slicing relevant datasets for interesting patterns, and a central hub for mission-driven investigative collaboration. This is what my startup made, but it turns out that this is not a very capital-friendly or profit-friendly idea, so I think it would require a patron like Jimbo to really make this happen in a scalable, impactful way.
Still, I wsh this endeavor all the best of luck and hope that it pushes the needle in the right direction.