Jay Rosen sent out word this morning that his next big project, now called Assignment Zero, is finally blog-safe. Technically, Assignment Zero is a collaboration between Rosen's NewAssignment.Net and WIRED magazine/WIRED.com, but from my perspective it looks like the place where we'll finally find out what happens when open-source journalism (now called "crowdsourcing") meets the real world.
The question we're all waiting to have answered: Now that the idea is being exposed to oxygen, will it rust -- or will it catch fire?
The concept of NewAssignment.Net isn't really all that complex: Mix the skills of professional reporters and editors with the information gathering and processing power of informed crowds to produce journalism that combines the strengths of both. Implementing it, on the other hand, has been an excruciatingly complex task. Rosen spent months raising money, building a staff and creating a network of contributors and advisers (transparency note: I'm one of them).
But the first assignment is now up, and you -- all of you -- are invited to participate.
(17:48 UPDATE: WIRED has just posted Rosen's piece introducing the project. Here's Newsvine's announcement of its participation -- I neglected to mention it earlier. Rosen in an afternoon e-mail on early reaction: "Users are reporting some significant problems with ease of use, knowing what to do, registering and such. Meanwhile, the most intriguing early success is the action in the comments at the Newsvine post, where you can see the participants treating as catalytic this announcement by their own site. Some community formation starts. Just a small sign, and it's early, but the kind of thing we seek." Amen. -- dc)
More about the particulars:
At each step we are going to enlist the help of anyone out there who wants to see the story of crowdsourcing get properly told. Some will be Wired.com or Newsvine users; the rest will come from across the Web. There's a team of about 10 editors, writers, designers and developers who are being paid to launch the platform, operate the site with users, set deadlines and organize the production of the story. They're going to take one big story -- on the spread of crowdsourcing and the people who are doing it -- and with your active assistance break that story down into interesting and reportable chunks. Some of them we already have. But we need more.
We're then going to develop those topics -- in the open, on the Assignment Desk and in the Reporters' Notebooks -- into more contoured pieces we can formally assign. Each is a part of the larger puzzle. We don't know yet how many pieces there will be.
We'll set deadlines for all those pieces, and with your help find contributors who are motivated and qualified to author them, not for pay (we're not at that stage yet...) but for public benefit and some byline glory in the final product. An "author" can be an individual writer, a team, a blog plus its users. A class could take on a subject area as an assignment, or maybe another high-participation site might take tackle an aspect of the larger story. We'll edit what comes in.
About two months from now -- not a set date, but in terms of a typical magazine schedule, soon -- Wired's Jeff Howe will write his own big story about crowdsourcing for Wired.com, drawn from all the research, reporting and survey responses you've contributed to Assignment Zero. We will publish in a big, splashy package at NewAssignment.Net, everything that came in and made the editor's final cut. Wired will be free to pick and choose from that material and publish any portion of it, in print or online. What isn't in the final package at our site or at Wired.com can appear elsewhere on the Net. (For more, see our Creative Commons license.)
I think the implications here are enormous. If this first story "succeeds," (which I define as "produces good information and begins to grow an active community of participants" -- Rosen and the actual participants may define success differently), we'll have a working model for how professional journalists might add value to the emerging power of social networks. Not only that, we'll have a new prism through which we -- all of us -- can choose to view citizenship.
It may not "succeed." As we've written here before, you may launch a product, but you can only grow a community. Assignment Zero and NewAssignment.Net will, ultimately, be no better than the community that choses to invest time in the vision they represent. Yet even if Assignment Zero never takes off the way its backers hope it will, we'll have learned something valuable. Probably several things.
Anyway, Rosen's piece in WIRED comes out tomorrow. Watch for it, and consider yourselves personally invited to participate in one of the most interesting new-media experiments ever created.
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