Is NewAssignment New Media?

I noticed the launch of a new, collaborative news site called New Assignment. There have been other attempts to blend citizen journalists into a pro-am-style media property. I was curious about how this one would fare. The first person I thought to ask was Andrew Nachison of ifocos.org (Institute for a Connected Society). He and his partner-in-crime, Dale Peskin have been convening thoughtleaders via ifocos and their popular conference, We Media. As their Mission Statement ...states:

"We help individuals and organizations worldwide understand and use expanding media and communications technologies both to innovate in business and to create better-informed global citizens."

So, I asked Andrew Nachison 4 questions about New Assignment and he wrote back a tremendous post:

"Jay Rosen, the uber-thoughtful New York University journalism professor and PressThink blogger, has landed a big partner, Wired Magazine, to help fund, collaborate in and promote his new collaborative journalism project, called NewAssignment.net, and this week Jay and Wired announced they have kicked off their first project, an attempt to crowdsource and report on ... crowdsourcing.

Crowd-whatting, you may ask? That's the term in vogue to describe various efforts to tap the knowledge and expertise of the people formerly known as the audience - and, really, to take advantage of the internet so that lots of people can collaborate on projects - like journalism - that historically have not been open and collaborative endeavors. It's an opportunity in the age of We Media. When everyone has the power not only to consume but create, share and remix information, some of us can choose to do so by collaborating with others on investigations, reporting and editing that traditionally was conducted in a more limited and unilateral fashion through slower analog processes (like journalists talking to sources one at a time, then painstakingly filtering and crafting expert ideas into a unified, coherent story - which might then be turned over to editors for further review and refinement). Wikipedia is the highest- profile example of crowdsourcing - an open source encyclopedia in which lots of people write and edit the entries. Dan Gillmor has long celebrated the opportunity for journalists to do better journalism by engaging in a conversation with the audience - to expand the universe of sources beyond the few of traditional journalism to the many of crowd-sourced journalism.

NewAssignment lists other crowdsource examples:

• Inspired by the book The Wisdom of Crowds, the opinion editor Mark Tapscott has launched the Washington Examiner Community Action Network (WeCan), which makes local government databases open to the public. Within one month WeCan made four government databases available to the public and generated several leads.

• Simone Reade at the Contra Costa Times relied on information from the crowd to expose dirty business practices at the local level.
• Minnesota Public Radio launched an Idea Generator
• And in Ft. Myers, Florida a network of citizen journalists cracked the case on ongoing concerns over price hikes in their utility assessments.

First Impressions

My friend John Bell at Oglivy asked me to provide some feedback on what Jay is up to. My thoughts today aren't all that different from when Jay announced the project last year - I have great respect for Jay as a thinker, I admire his desire to test some ideas with a project that might accomplish something, I have no doubt that there's lots of intelligence to be tapped in the connected society to produce better journalism, and Jay is clearly getting some good advice and some good early support to help him take a different approach.

So I'm reserving judgment and I'm rooting for Jay to be enormously successful.

My initial impressions:

• The site makes my head spin. I don't know what to do with it. I accept the confusion of a newbie and dive in to try to figure it out. I read "The Scoop" by Lauren Sandler on the home page for a clue. It says something about turning in for the night - but I'm reading this Thursday morning. A time stamp would help. Fine, I get it. This was written last night. I persevere. I figure out that Lauren is the site's editor, "The Scoop" the most recent post on her blog- which doesn't have time (or date) stamps.

• I'm disappointed the first project is about crowdsourcing. That's too "inside baseball" for me - but I forgive it. Maybe someone has wisely advised Jay to focus on a story with a tech angle, because tech bloggers and sites are overly influential in driving buzz about new web sites and services.

• There's some good initial feedback in the site's discussion forum.
  • One author writes, "If you really want to test crowdsourcing as a journalistic model, wouldn't it be better to focus on any of the thousands of interesting stories that are not about crowdsourcing?"
  • Others suggest different topics to pursue, like investigating CEO pay, hurricane Katrina recovery and U.S. detentions and renditions in the name of counter-terrorism.

• The site says "We're covering a story." But when I visit the The Assignment Desk I see a bunch of stories listed. Are they covering the others, or not?

• And what does "covering" mean anyway. I read that there's a daily editorial meeting, it's closed to the publc but the editor will report on it. Huh? How about setting up a webcam, at least, with a chat channel or something to open it up and gather input from the NewAssignment community, if there's gong to be one.

• Confusion Afterthought: I've had this feeling before with sites built on Drupal - a powerful open-source publishing system that seems to inspire complicated sites.

John also asked me some specific questions:

1. How do you define "media" today?

Everyone and everything is media - or soon will be. Individuals are media; corporations are media; governments are media. Media companies are media; their customers are media; their advertisers are media. We create, we consume, we share, we influence, we tune in and we tune out. No, we're not all doing those things, and we won't. But we're all empowered in ways that were impossible before.

2. Assignment Zero is applying co-creation to journalism: "this is an attempt to bring journalists together with people in the public who can help cover a story."

Most of what's taking place online isn't really co-creation, it's conversation, through which there may be some occasional or spontaneous virtual smartmob to borrow Howard Rheingold's term, when individuals choose not only to opine and debate but to come together, work together and learn together. I don't look at conversations in a blog or YouTube comments, or recommendation engines like Digg, as co-creation. They ARE tapping the wisdom of crowds, but the creation is mostly done by individuals.

So, NewAssignment is an attempt to create what could become a marketplace for collaborative journalism. The collaboration/co-creation idea is a big deal; the potential to create a marketplace is a big deal. I don't know that either will be successful at NewAssignment, but it's a worthy experiment.

3. How does this differ between what traditional news orgs (e.g. newspapers) are doing by placing links to related blog posts adjacent to pro-journalist articles?

They are completely different. It's great that big media has rediscovered that the internet is hyperlinked, and that the value of pro journalism can be enhanced with additional ideas and context produced elsewhere. A more interesting comparison is to look at NewAssignment along side the experts community that Minnesota Public Radio has set up. The difference is that NewAssignment is attempting to open the process of journalism even further, by inviting anyone to contribute; MPR has built a big database of engaged and interested people, but they inform MPR's professional journalists through surveys, email and phone calls - and that all takes place behind the curtain. The conversation with the expert panels is not open for anyone to listen to. Pros still do the listening, reporting and producing.

4. What do you think New Assignment may become.

If it inspires a lot of people to work together and they dig into important questions and do journalism that isn't being done elsewhere, and they do it better and faster than is humanly possible through traditional techniques, then it could become a model for the new mainstream; or maybe it will become a community for crowdsource enthusiasts, which might be a fairly limited and esoteric niche, but valuable in its own right; or maybe it will become a marketplace and service bureau for anyone who wants to pay for journalism - and then maybe we'll see a renewal of investigative reporting and journalism funded by individuals and institutions other than mainstream media companies. Or maybe it will fail, like most startup businesses. I'll give it time and wish it well."

Comments

[giles rhys jones]

Skoeps is a very interesting model. essentially a community news agency.

michael@skoeps.nl