I remember the early days of Wikipedia. I remember thinking "this is crap" and I don't think I was mistaken at the time. The interesting thing about Wikipedia is that there was never a period where it seemed "good but". It went from a few years of being crap to evoking wow very quickly. It went from a sustained period of less useful than Britannica to more useful in the blink of an eye.

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.