Open News: How Volunteer Journalism Keeps Information Free and Transparent
When you think of news, you probably picture headlines, breaking stories, and paid reporters. But open news, a model of journalism built by volunteers, free from corporate control, and grounded in public access to information. Also known as community journalism, it’s how Wikipedia’s Wikinews and the The Signpost keep the public informed without a paywall, ad tracker, or corporate owner. This isn’t fringe stuff—it’s a working alternative to mainstream media, powered by people who care more about accuracy than clicks.
Open news isn’t just about writing articles. It’s a system built on volunteer journalism, the practice of reporting, editing, and fact-checking news without pay, relying on expertise, transparency, and community review. These volunteers use open knowledge, information that’s freely licensed, reusable, and verifiable through public sources to build stories. They follow strict sourcing rules, avoid original reporting, and only publish what’s backed by reliable, published material. That’s why Wikinews stories often look different from what you see on TV—they’re slower, but they’re harder to dispute. And because everything is licensed under CC BY-SA, any other outlet can reuse it, as long as they credit the source. That’s the real power of open news: it doesn’t just inform—it enables.
What keeps this system alive? Not funding. Not marketing. Not algorithms. It’s a quiet, stubborn belief that knowledge should belong to everyone. The Wikinews, a Wikipedia project dedicated to original, neutral news reporting by volunteers has no budget, no staff, and no advertisers. It survives because editors from Berlin to Bangalore show up every day to verify facts, fix errors, and update timelines. Meanwhile, The Signpost, Wikipedia’s own volunteer-run newspaper that reports on Wikipedia’s internal changes, policies, and community debates doesn’t cover global headlines—it covers the hidden machinery behind the encyclopedia. Both are examples of open news in action: slow, steady, and built on trust, not traffic.
You won’t find open news on your morning news app. But if you’ve ever checked a Wikipedia article to understand a complex event, you’ve already used its output. The people behind these projects don’t want fame. They want accuracy. They want accountability. And they want to prove that journalism doesn’t need to be a business to be trustworthy. Below, you’ll find deep dives into how this system works—the challenges, the wins, the fights over sourcing, the fights over bias, and the quiet victories that keep the lights on. This isn’t about what’s trending. It’s about what’s true.
The History and Evolution of Wikinews Since Its 2004 Launch
Wikinews launched in 2004 as a volunteer-driven news site using Wikipedia’s open model. Though it never went mainstream, it pioneered transparent, source-based journalism and still operates today as a quiet archive of verifiable reporting.
