… any chance to be part of it from Europe, Strasbourg, France ?

Great site concept and best of luck with the implementation.

As you may have seen recently on Digg, there’s a mounting public furor over the injustice of the Genarlow Wilson case, in which a 17 year-old was sentenced to 10 years in prison without hope of parole for engaging in consensual oral sex with a 15 year-old and will be required to register as a sex offender.

Obviously, common sense is absent in this case. The Georgia Supreme Court just threw out Wilson’s appeal. He’s already served 2 years and has another 8 to go — despite the fact that this was his first offense, he had no prior record, and the law has since been amended (but cannot be amended retroactively to apply to his case).

Perhaps if outraged citizens took up the reins of organized journalism in cases like this, they could obtain the kinds of answers that larger news outlets seem unable to evoke by using constant pressure to get at the heart of the matter.

I am one of those “wing nut” bloggers, and while I am not anti-war, I an anti Iraq War, it was the wrong war at the wrong time. I am a disabled infantryman, served this nation in 2 wars, Vietnam and Desert Storm, so I might be wrong, but I have earned the right to express myself.

I have a story that needs to be told, I am one of the 7120 men of MKULTRA, the MSM will not touch it, yet some of the men involved in it are still powerful in our nation today, why? Why won’t the MSM mention it, at least to question them on their involvement on human testing?

I enjoy reading and writing I have little else to do now that I am in this power chair, I feel which is the end result of exposures thru the experiments at Edgewood Arsenal.

If there are any journalists interested, I have over four years of research available.

As far as ad revenue goes, even Daily Kos is making decent money on ads on the blog site so the money is there if you create the content

Good luck, Jay and crew, and congratulations on getting this far.

I am a junior at Texas Tech University, majoring in broadcast journalism and am very excited about the concept of this new citizen journalism. My question is how can i be involved with this groundbreaking part of history? Also, is there any sort of readers “bill of rights” that this organization will follow? If so, what would they be? Thanks for your time.

Alix

I’m quite enthusiasmed by NewAssignment project. Have you considered offering translated versions of the site ? If it’s the case, I propose to participate as a volunteer translator, english to french.

Llecuyer, student journalist in Paris.

[…] New Assignment.Net is a non-profit site that tries to spark innovation in journalism by showing that open collaboration over the Internet among reporters, editors and large groups of users can produce high-quality work that serves the public interest, holds up under scrutiny, and builds trust. […]

sounds good

Hi Jay:

Congrats on the early support (and great feedback) you’re getting for this project. It seems very much like the OhMyNews model which has been quite successful in Korea for at least 3 or 4 years now. I’m wondering.. what (if any?) difference do you see between the two offerings as OMN has already established an intl. version as well.

[…] Professionele en amateur-journalisten gaan horizontaal Reuters gaat een ton dollar investeren in nieuwssite www.NewAssignment.net. De site ‘does stories the regular news media doesn’t do, can’t do, wouldn’t do, or already screwed up.’ Het fantastische idee van het brein achter deze site: journalisten moeten horizontaal gaan werken. […]

It will be a Creative Commons license of some kind, Matthew. I do intend to permit redistribution and derivative works.

Who will own the copyright over the published content, and under what terms will it be distributed? If you do not intend to permit redistribution and derivative works, please do not associate what you are doing with “open source”. This is misleading.

Jay,

This sounds like a really good idea. I also invite you to have a look at our weblog which we have established on similar themes.

We have a team of professional editors on a voluntary basis helping wannabe writers and journalists to edit their work and publish it in a free, democratic forum with audiences worldwide.

The project has been goping for a year now and we;ve had some great responses from established journalists, academics and students alike.

The address is: http://wanabehuman.blogspot.com

We’d be grateful for any comments & suggestions on the project.

Looking forward to hearing from you soon!

Kind regards,

Shuvra

Hello:

This is an incredible idea, and I would love to contribute. By pooling together the collective effort of the blogosphere maybe we would have a chance to counter the power of the MSM.

Please let me know if as new information become available, and I will continue to watch this site for developments!

Scott

Great Idea. Those of use that freelance and publish are really in need of collaborative groups of knowledge and work leads. This is what has been needed for a long time…. THE TIME IS NOW…. thanks!!!!!

[…] The money from Reuters will underwrite the costs of hiring our first editor, who will start in early 2007. (I introduced the idea of New Assignment here. A summary, with blog and press reactions, is here.) […]

Nice to visit NewAssignment.Net! Congrates for the idea. I am concerned about, whether the site will cover global topics or not. If yes, then i have a lot to contribute from the place called “Paradise on earth”. In fact Indian occupied Kashmir has lot to say to the global audience, about its journey from tourism to terrorism, its rich cultural history, from ballet to bullet and so on. There are many serious topics that are crying to be covered,They should not only cover this, but give it legs.

We are definitely going to make wikis and their use integral to the way we operate, Maurreen. I think that is going to prove essential. ‘Course, it’s easy to say: Let’s use wikis. Figuring out how to use them journalistically and with particular user communities (found or made) is where the learning is. NewAssignment.Net is going to go there.

Thanks to all who have expressed a desire to participate, contribute. It’s… inspiring. I am going to ask for your patience as we get ourselves together. We’re doing things one at a time. The rest of 2006 is going to be a building, testing and planning period, an exercise in self-definition, if you will. We’re in the pre-launch phase. I am getting organized, raising money, pulling together people to advise and help, getting started on the site, which we will bring online in stages in 2007. This isn’t it. This is just a blog we have as a starter site.

In reply to others in this thread, we will certainly consider organizing NewAssignment.Net investigations internationally. Once we figure out exactly how we are going to operate, something that is far from settled. That’s why discussions like this thread are very worthwhile.

I’m not sure anyone has done the kind of pro-am, open source, “distributed” reporting that I had in mind when I introduced New Assignment. But mine is just one view of how it would or could work. My advisers have been steadily modifying my ideas. Many people have brought to my attention similar or related efforts, and that has changed what NewAssignment.Net “is.” Future users will tell us a great deal; whatever community develops at the site will powerfully affect what NewAssignment.Net becomes. Volunteers, as well as donors will vote with their voices, dollars, feet… mouse clicks. There’s a lot of crucial information to come.

I’m also planning a series of essays fleshing out NewAssignment’s principles of operation, as I see them now, pre-launch. PressThink is the right place for that, but I will also publish them here.

For now—and I know how frustrating this is—NewAssignment.Net is still an idea (our ambition to have a site like the one I described in this post) with $20,000 in the bank, and a blog for discussing the idea. So far that is all I have to offer you. But under the surface things are moving, and there is more to come.

Jay, this is impressive and exciting.
Here’s an idea: You could make the planning more collaborative through a wiki.

[…] From the comments at the previous post comes this from Allan Macleese: The key thing to me, a retired newspaperperson, is that there are, I would guess, hundreds of us our there that would dearly love to be turned loose on a good honest project. We were what could be called pros, and we are sitting here, idle, dinking about with this and that, and want to return to the action. So we used to be in the MSM, but don’t discount us, we will work for nothing, as many of us agreed, in esence,to do when we went to work on newspapers in the first instance. […]

I’m most interested in the necessity of editors: what provokes the distrust that incites their existence. Why can’t the content produced stand alone. If, say, you were to provide a platform upon which individual stories/pieces can stand and then be ranked and passed along willy nilly by the users of that very content? Current.tv,Youtube.com, and even delicious employ this model in different ways. Yet, there remains a lingering fear that the basest, most vulgar material rises with the most interesting/informative. Its a chilling effect that causes concern for the quality of the user generated content. Will Newsassignment deliminate thresholds of worthy material? What are the parameters? Who are the “trusted” (as someone said)?

One might say that editors serve the role as guide and arbitor’s — navigational assistants — and as such their input would be minimal. But, at the same time, why not satiate these interests and desires? If myspace has taught us anything its that the larger the contributing population the more crap there is to sift through. Why do we, in the end, feel that we need to divert attention to real news? Aren’t we going to look for the video of the guy getting hit in the groin anyway?

I can’t wait to donate and contribute to this worthy project.

I hope to be able to participate in this journalism revolution of sorts. The marriage of amateur and professional is a long time and coming, IMO. The only difference between an A and a B student is the B student needs more enticement. Maybe this is it.

What is in it for my part of the world? Will the journalists here, professional or amateur, be able to contribute or be just at the receving end.

M. A. Hameed
Lahore, Pakistan

Good luck!

You just gained international coverage, Jay, so please consider less America centric stories (I mean, sheesh, what ever happens in America anymore?)

Recommend consistency. Pick the interval: daily, weekly, monthly, but at least maintain that highly motivating - and totally scary - looming deadline. With the type of enterprise you’re working to establish here, it is *very* easy to gather a massive amount of information with little-to-no value.

And what the hell, “why” and “how” are such small words, why not include them as elements in the stories you’ll produce. We get enough of the “4Ws” elsewhere.

Argh, sorry about the runaway formatting. Corrected links here:

Luggage article: http://phlairline.com/news/09010602.html

Asylum article: http://www.libertypost.org/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=152603

Ideas:

1) What’s going on with lost baggage? In Philadelphia, delays this summer of in getting luggage have stretched past the two-hour mark, for no apparent reason. (See this .) Imagine NA recruiting business travelers to track the number of minutes it takes baggage to appear on the carousel. A single data point tells us nothing, but 800 business travelers reporting on four or five flights a week tells us a whole lot. You might even be able to hook in a safety angle — are bags sitting unattended for hours on end?

2) Review of legal outcomes in some specific kind of case. This was recently done with asylum seekers. In theory, immigration judges all over the country are applying the same standards and the same law to every person seeking asylum. In practice, judges vary in the rate at which they grant asylum, denying between 10% and 98% of claims. (AP article reprinted here.)

3) Follow the money on some specific budget line item. Most of the states have vanity license plate programs now. How many different kinds of plates does each state offer? How much money do they earn? How much goes to charity and how much to the state? What happens to the state money — does it go into the general fund or for some specific use? The outrage factor on this one is probably lower, but who knows. Someone told me that the Virgina anti-terrorism license plate actually gives ZERO money to anti-terrorism work.

(For a politically progressive example of this kind of analysis, see the work of the State Fiscal Analysis Initiative.)

My suggestions for a good NA assignment:

1) Geographically replicable. Don’t examine a strange little quirk in California law. Look at an issue that is pretty much the same in every state (or every town). That will widen the pool of potential contributers (NA is still going to need to recruit hard) AND potential audiences (what did they say about MY state?).

2) Inarguable. Amount of state money spent on X, number of arrests made, outcome of a court case — these are not spin-able outcomes. I think NA needs to start out collecting data that its opponents (and even the skeptics) won’t be able to question. There is plenty of room for analysis of nuances surrounding the factual data, but start with something that has one right answer.

3) Time-sensitive. Not a breaking news story — NA’s going to have a learning curve, and you don’t want to waste resources. But also not something with no defined end, because even enthusiastic contributers will need a prod and to get any mainstream news coverage you’ll need a hook. Pick a time period, pick a legislative session, pick an annual budget…whatever. But define it.

4) Personal relevance. I’m a little less sure of this one, but in 15 years of being part of online communities I continue to be amazed at how parochial we all are, in the best sense of the word. You’re not Consumer Reports, but there’s a big difference between a NA report on, say, how states differ in prosecuting terrorism; and how airlines differ in handling baggage. The former affects a tiny percentage of people, disproportionately non-white and non-rich. The latter affects a huge, more-representative swath of the American population on a regular basis.

This is getting long. Will post a follow-up comment with a few ideas.

Very nice to see this platform. As a Chinese teaching in university, is it possible to post idea in Chinese. May I share some management idea in this net?

I am waiting for the launch of your project. As a writer based in the Philippines, you will give us a lot of opportunity to express views not found in the traditional media.

Jay, good to hear of you from my professor in Korea. Thanks for your nice comments for readers of Dong-A Daily a couple of years ago. You have mentioned about the future of the civic journalism in the internet era, I remember. It’s now very easy to say we live in and with the internet, but it’s not so easy to invent the model, for business as well as for journalism, for the media. And I love the model you suggested. Good luck!!

Here’s an assignment
Find out which reporters from which news media were at the two events mentioned by Charles Pierce at Tapped
“The profession lost its mind in 2000, with very unfortunate consequences. There was the War on Gore, which I witnessed first-hand when the vice president got heckled and booed by some of the people watching him on TV in the press room at the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Iowa. (Oh, yes, you did, kids, just the way you did in Hanover later on.)”
Then ask their editors and publishers what they did about it and how they view it?
This was also covered at the Daily Howler

I just heard about this on NPR’s “On the Media” and I love it. I’m a photojournalist working for WKSU in Kent, Ohio (an NPR member station) and I’d like to help on some level. I just graduated from college but I’ve been working in the industry for about 5 years.

I think the Ohio gubernatorial race this year is a big story. Ken Blackwell, the Republican candidate, was secreatry of state under the previous governor Bob Taft. He is in the position now to oversee his own election. Blackwell has been cast as a corrupt politician by the Democrats, rumored to have rigged the 2004 presidential election here in Ohio for Bush, though nothing has been proven and the party denys it. This is just one aspect of this election that warrents a story or two, any thoughts?

[…] Collaborative media is just starting to develop some momentum. News Assignment is project spearheaded by Jay Rosen(a teaches Journalism at New York University). It enables amateur and professional reporters to collaborate on the development of assignments and stories using open source principals. […]

Another suggestion - request and report disclosures from an impartially selected set of bloggers, e.g. the top 100 by traffic. We contact them, ask the same questions of each, and compile and report the results and refusals.

For example, at least one “tech products” blog proprietor gets a good income from payola, but doesn’t disclose this on the site; how common is this practice?

This is ported over from PressThink.

Your ideas are very interesting, and I hope it all works. I have one question, though, based upon what happens so often in blogs, what happens when someone posts something which is not true, meaning, a fact. How will you know whether the information is verifiable in some way? How will you verify it?

Posted by: margaret at August 30, 2006 10:10 PM | Permalink

Margaret: your question about verification is a key operating challenge for NewAssignment.Net. There is not going to be one answer to it, but the answers we do find will be basic to making the thing work. It would be criminally naive to just assume that what you get from citizen contributors is true. But New Assignment won’t be starting from zero. Other sites that rely on such contributors have had to figure out reliability measures that work for them.

The simplest answer is: everything gets fact-checked before it is published as finished work, which is closer to the way good magazine journalism works. (Fact checking could itself be a volunteer task.) This allows the site to collect “unverified” information, to label it as such for an interim period, and then to change that designation as we grow more confident in it. Another answer: reliability ratings for contributors that over time tell you who can be trusted. Some stories will rely on networks of people we know from having worked with them before, so we won’t be re-inventing the verification wheel each time.

Third answer: redundancy systems. More than one person on a given assignment allows you to cross check what contributors give you. Here’s Zephyr Teachout at the NewAssignment site with another answer: notarized statements. Who knows? Maybe we’ll experiment with our own version of “sworn” statements.

Shouldn’t the site treat facts supplied by a user whose real name, working email address and phone number we know (stored confidentially, of course) differently from facts supplied by an anonymous user we have no way of contacting? Of course it should, and it will.

Through a mix of different systems, the problem can, I think, be solved. But the way it’s actually going to be solved is case by case, project by project, measure by measure.

What some do is come upon a problem like this, throw up their proverbial hands because they don’t see an easy solution, and from there it’s a straight shot to: “It can’t work. You can’t trust information collected by just anyone…”

What they’re skipping over is the problem-solving stage, where we try to go from bug to feature.

And a food for thought -

There are a lot of “do-gooder” organizations floating around, that presumably have members doing good.

The Earmarks Project does not appear to be yielding an overwhelming response.

Nobody I talk to locally has heard of it.

It might be good network-j strategy to think about what organizations already exist, whose members are active and would share an interest in taking part.
(rather like the Interfaith Power and Light nationwide(?) initiative for congregations to screen An Inconvenient Truth and other global warming films in October)

IMO Zephyr’s ‘notary public’ idea is excellent.

An observation -

The “swarm journalism” form is tailor-made for surveys where the desired respondents aren’t likely to step up to the plate and participate unless they’re asked by someone who’s connected to them (via geography, constituency, etc)

The Earmarks Project is one instance of this.

Another instance - we’ve got an “An Inconvenient Truth” project going in our (semi-rural) county, encouraging and offering tickets to public figures to see the film (here for 7+ weeks), and now going back to see who _did_ go, what they thought of it, and whether they think global warming is an urgent issue.
(“we” being two major contributors and several less active ones)

Maybe a variant of this project could be extended to other areas?

(and it’d be interesting for comparison, to a followup (if one were to be done) to the “100 climatologists” AP story - when that story was published, only 19(?) of the 100 had seen the film, presumably now the number’s much larger so the results (and diff, if any) would be illuminating )

The main question would be “how do public servants’ views on global warming match up with climatologists’ views”?

Alternatively, we could survey selected bloggers.

(p.s. any chance we could get a “preview” button, on this “submit a comment” page?)

Jay,

Congratulations on venturing out there, and I think congratulations are due just on the venture alone!

One thing I’ve been thinking about in terms of citizen contributions and credibility is ways in which we can find methods of confirmation that are trustworthy — in journalism, the item of trustworthiness is character. However, that isn’t the only truth-measuring mechanism out there. In law, for example, the fact a lawyer says something is true is not sufficient proof — a witness is needed, or, when paper is acceptable, a notarized statement. Notaries are everywhere — at every corner bank, for one — and it occurs to me that using notaries for statements in articles allows for a very high degree of reliability. If I’m a citizen doing an article on Katrina, for example, I could write down what someone said, and then get it notarized and signed. It may sound a little bizarre, but in cases when the solidity of information is really important, it may be worth looking to rules of evidence as a guide to how another truth-seeking system in our society has come to terms with proof.

[…] An aggregated effort to create the future: http://newassignment.wordpress.com/2006/08/19/welcome-to-newassignmentne... […]

“there are, I would guess, hundreds of us our there that would dearly love to be turned loose on a good honest project.” - Alan Macleese

I seem to recall that there was an organization for retired business owners/executives, who were willing to provide advice if a small business owner wanted it.

It would be wonderful if there were a similar organization for investigative journalism.