New Assignment
Leading up to the Networked Journalism Summit
Posted on 09. Oct, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis.
Wednesday morning, the Networked Journalism Summit opens at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism. Students will be liveblogging at this summit blog and I’ll ask the participants to tag their posts, photos, videos, etc. “netj.” Rachel Sterne from Ground Report also plans to broadcast from the summit.
Jay Rosen beats them to the punch tonight with a great post that both walks up to the summit and shares his lessons from NewAssignment.net. Jay’s summary:
That is my attempt to map the perimeter: solutions lie within. Division of labor is the key creative decision in acts of distributed reporting. Grok the motivations or it can’t be done. Watch for ballooning coordination costs as ramp up succeeds. Where the small pieces meet the larger narrative the alchemy of the project lives. Shared background knowledge raises group capacity. Extant communities already coordinate well.
No one is saying that collaborative, pro-am, networked journalism is the cure to the industry’s ills or that it will replace the professional model. I believe that it is one means by which journalism can and should expand now — even as journalistic organizations’ revenue and often staffs decline. New Assignment is one way to try this — with Rosen et al or on your own, as Brian Lehrer at WNYC has done. And the day’s participants will hear about many other endeavors in other models. I hope we all leave with information and inspiration and new ideas to implement and experiment with. We will report back on their plans and will follow up with progress reports.
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Jay Rosen — NewAssignment.Net
Posted on 14. Sep, 2007 by David Cohn.
Introduction to NewAssignment.Net: In the Fall of 2005 Jay Rosen, author of PressThink and NYU journalism professor, began playing with the idea for an organization dedicated to experimenting in online journalism. The concept stemmed from his experiences blogging since 2003 and general curiosity about the open source software movement — how groups of people online can work together on a single project. With a Macarthur Foundation grant Rosen was able to see this idea to fruition with NewAssignment.Net. Although closer to an academic research project than a company, NewAssignment.Net works with media organizations that are willing to experiment in open platform journalism.
Main Goal: To spark innovation in open platform journalism. Journalism that is done by a network of people on the web using social media as a tool for investigations. This type of work is done in the open and often relies on a gift economy. “It’s such a new practice area, that it’s unrealistic to think that traditional news organizations would do this work, but if somebody else goes first they might follow. I don’t think that we’ll discover the answers or we’ll provide the solutions, but that others looking on and reviewing what we do will,” says Rosen.
