Wikipedia founder calls for the end of the opinion page

Posted by Alexandra Jaffe on March 18, 2010 at 5:06 PM

A cacophony of voices from across the web have begun to take issue with that holdover from legacy media, the op-ed page.

Ezra Klein, Washington Post domestic policy blogger, posted an indictment of the Washington Post's op-ed page on Monday.

"I don't really understand why my op-ed page, or all the other op-ed pages, waste so much real-estate publishing talking points from politicians," he lamented. He went on to argue that op-ed pages should post pieces written by experts "for a different purpose...than those written by political experts."

In response, Slate's Jack Shafer pointed out that rather than having a disproportionate amount of politicians on its op-ed page, the Washington Post simply has too many regular columnists.

"These Post regulars hog journalistic real estate that could go to less predictable writers and provide more variety," he argued, citing the 12 regular columnists employed by the Washington Post.

But the most extreme viewpoint came from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales at the Guardian Changing Media Summit this week. Rather than remove politicians from the page, or freshen up its line of regular columnists, Wales suggested that newspapers should do away with their opinion pages altogether.

"The best of the political bloggers are easily the equal of the opinion columnists at the New York Times," he said.

"I don't see the added value there and question whether a newspaper should be paying large sums of money for that anymore."

Increasingly, though, newspapers are catching on to the blogging trend and hiring well-known bloggers of their own--Klein, who began blogging about policy in college just for fun and now writes for the Washington Post and Newsweek, is evidence of this. But with thousands of voices joining the blogosphere each day, will op-ed pages someday become obsolete?

Sources: The Washington Post, Slate, PaidContent