User:Frankie Roberto

I'm Frankie Roberto - an administrator for Wikinews and an accredited reporter. I tend to write mainly about London and UK news and adding coverage on some of the bigger international stories. I don't always have a huge amount of time to spend working with Wikinews, which is partly why I'm taking on the project below.

Dedicating a week to Wikinews

Unlike encyclopedias, news websites need to get stories out fast in order to be relevant. This makes the task of a volunteer-edited news website harder, as we've all got other things to be doing with our lives. I'm really interested in the project and 'citizen journalism' (an awful term, but there we go) generally, and so I've wanted to really be able to dedicate some time to it in order to be able to do it properly.

So, as I had plenty of holiday going spare, I've decided to dedicate next week (19 - 23rd June) to working full-time on writing and editing news stories, primarily through Wikinews. I'm not a journalist, and have no desire to be so, but I'm a news junkie and I'm hoping some passion will get me through the week.

I'm based in London, UK, and will hopefully be doing a mixture of writing stories using secondary sources and doing some original reporting. BBC News Online have generously offered me a base to work from.

I would really like to work with the community here as much as possible, so if you have any leads or suggestions of stories which you would like me to try and cover, please let me know.

My Schedule

The BBC have just put up my introduction to the project: A citizen among journalists, which includes a link to Wikinews...