“In my vision of the future of the newspaper industry and of journalism in general, people who think that traditional media organisations are going to go away are just kidding themselves,” he says. “That doesn’t make any sense to me. On other hand, people who think that journalism can just stay the way it is are also just kidding themselves.
“What we will see is a set of hybrid models with an increasing amount of citizen participation in the gathering of news and in feedback and in reporting and analysing the news. And at the same time, we’ll have professional organisations managing the process – basically being the core framework.”
The example Mr Wales gives comes from a spell of consulting he carried out for the BBC last year.
“In the sport division of the BBC they are very interested in thinking about how they can have better coverage of minor sports. Sometimes they are criticised for focusing only on major sports. They don’t carry coverage of every sport and every local club around the country – they don’t have enough money, it’s impossible.
“So what they’re saying is, ‘wouldn’t be interesting if we had a model where we could cover the major sports with our traditional people and enrich the whole experience by bringing in people to allow other sporting communities to report on themselves?’
“I’d say that makes a lot of sense. In a similar way, if people out there are willing to make webpages and content, then it makes sense for the newspapers to get involved with that.”