Leading up to the Networked Journalism Summit

Posted on 09. Oct, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis in New Assignment

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.