Wiadomości24.pl

» see wiadomosci24.pl as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Wiadomości24.pl went live on 14 June 2006, built by Gratka Technologie for the newspaper group Polskapresse, later Polska Press. The premise was the one everybody was testing that year: the readers write the news. You registered and filed a story about the flood in your town or the concert nobody had reviewed. An editor in Warsaw checked it, and it went out under your name on a national site with a newspaper company's name behind it.

It worked for a while and it worked at real scale. Over eleven years more than 7,000 authors published close to 185,000 pieces and uploaded around 600,000 photographs. There was a Citizen Journalist of the Year competition every year from 2006 to 2012, judged partly by readers and partly by the editors. Sport and culture had their own categories. The site's own masthead carried a Webstarfestival badge for site of the year 2007 in the media category, which it kept in the logo long after the festival had stopped mattering.

The decline shows up cleanly in the Megapanel numbers. In January 2012 the site had 627,600 users and 3.23 million page views in a month. By January 2015 that was 232,800 users and 1.27 million page views, a fall of roughly two thirds in three years, during exactly the period when Polish internet users were moving their local news posting onto Facebook groups.

On 22 September 2017 Polska Press announced the closure. The statement said the internet and the world had changed in eleven years, that users had moved their activity to social media, and that the platform had been having trouble with spam and fake submissions. Contributors were given three months to save their own material, after which, as the trade press put it plainly, the site would disappear from the internet.

~ the chronicle ~

~ seven thousand authors ~

Citizen journalism in the middle 2000s was a serious argument, not a gimmick. OhmyNews in South Korea had shown that amateur reporters could move a national election, and every large publisher in Europe spent a few years working out whether the same thing would happen to them. Polska Press built its answer rather than buying one, and for six or seven years it had something a Facebook group still cannot produce: an edited archive with bylines, searchable in one place.

The economics were never solved. Contributors were not paid in any meaningful way, which is fine while the motivation is seeing your name on a real site, and stops being fine the moment a social network offers the same recognition with no editor in between and a much bigger audience. From 2010 the site was running competitions with paid SMS voting attached, which is what a publisher does when the advertising does not cover the editing.

What it did produce was a training ground. A generation of Polish local reporters and bloggers filed their first pieces there, and some of the Citizen Journalist of the Year winners went on to write professionally. That part does not show up in any traffic chart.

~ the move that never happened ~

The goodbye banner on the front page did not say the word closed. It said przeprowadzka, moving house, under a hash mark: thank you for your activity on wiadomosci24, we are closing for the move, soon we will see each other in a completely new home. Polska Press had promised a replacement service in a new formula within the three months.

The three months came and went and the site was still there, serving its full front page as late as 18 February 2018. By 21 February it was answering with a redirect, and it has been redirecting ever since, to a section named wiadomosci24 on naszemiasto.pl. That is the new home the banner promised, and it is a category page on somebody else's website.

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