Assignment Zero Tests Pro-Am Journalism

Jay Rosen writes "Assignment Zero is a pro-am, open-platform reporting project. The investigation: crowd sourcing and peer production are a social trend growing well beyond tech. Why is this happening? Partners: NewAssignment.Net and Wired.com, with Newsvine. From the Wired essay: 'We're trying to figure something out here. Can large groups of widely scattered people, working together voluntarily on the net, report on something happening in their world right now, and by dividing the work wisely tell the story more completely, while hitting high standards in truth, accuracy and free expression?' Wired.com: 'We want out readers and our sources to be one and the same. We think it will make for better journalism.'"

Precedent: "stringers"

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

There's a long-standing precedent for this: newspapers and other media have used "stringers" for years. These are people with some interest in subject/beat X and some ability to write articles about X who are hired on a per-article basis at below-market rates. (It's not free labor, but it's awfully cheap.)

Re:Truth

[gavink42]

It's true that news organizations put their opinions into stories these days, but I'm not so sure we won't see the same thing from this.

For that matter, even the already mentioned Wiki articles are biased by the views and opinions of the submitters.

I just think it's the nature of the beast of journalism these days. If you truly want to get both sides of a story, you have to read several opposing sources and balance it all out yourself. A good example of this is CNN -vs- Fox News.

So...WikiNews?

[SixFactor]

That's what it sounds like to me.

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page [wikinews.org]