Via Jeff Howe at Crowdsourcing.com.

As you may know, I’m writing a book about crowdsourcing and also operate the blog, Crowdsourcing.com. I’ve been publishing the lion’s share of this book on the Website with the goal of eliciting critical comments that can be collected together and published in an appendix to the book proper. The idea, obviously, is that a book on crowdsourcing would also embody some degree of crowdsourcing. But further, I’m hoping to help pioneer a model of book publishing in which the book can serve as a dialogue as much as a monologue. The comments from readers in the appendix will be used to show that crowdsourcing touches on many issues that can be viewed from multiple perspectives.

I’ve been very happy with the quality of comments, but unfortunately the quantity and diversity among commenters is lacking. In other words, too few people are taking the time to read my work and disagree with me! So I’m appealing to all of you to stop by crowdsourcing.com in the next three weeks and contribute your insights, your experience and your wit. I’d really like to make this little experiment work, but naturally, I can’t do it without the crowd.

I’ve been Jeff’s research assistant for a reason - I’ve studied and talked about Crowdsourcing on this blog as well, which means perhaps some of you are interested in the topic as well. If so - check out Jeff’s blog and see if you have a critique. You just might end up in the footnote to his book.

Once again, I am unable to give the following post the attention it deserves. But hey, that’s what happens when you are juggling other projects (see the right hand column of this blog).

Still: I want to bring attention to Leonard Witt’s newest venture: “Representative Journalism.” Essentially what Leonard Witt is organizing is crowdfunded journalism. With small donations from people on a regular basis - the community will rent a journalist. I think it’s a fantastic idea, testing a paradigm shift in the business model of journalism.

Who will that journalist be? Apply or spread the word.

Dallas Morning News asks its readers, “Help us examine the lost JFK files.”

A particularly smart move not only because the JFK files are too many for any single journalist to examine - but because it’s a local story with national appeal.

The role of the newsroom: pointing out where the story is and asking for help in uncovering the facts. As The Dallas Morning News put it: “Given the volume, we haven’t been able to review most of the files. That’s why were calling on you. Here’s your chance to review never-seen-before materials related to the JFK assassination.”

Last week I had the pleasure of chatting with Tim Hood the founder of Yoosk.com which is in full startup mode. I’m confident I had come across the site before, although I’m not sure where. Perhaps this Center for Citizen Media post? Either way - Yoosk looks to have some real potential. We all remember CNN’s YouTube debate. Well, why does it have to be a special occasion to let readers ask questions of public figures? It shouldn’t be a herculian effort? All that’s needed is a CMS that has a workflow built into it - so journalists can ask the questions that are important to their readers. That’s what Yoosk hopes to find out. Explaining the idea in greater detail is Tim Hood.

Yoosk is a crowd sourced interview magazine site- it has been referred to by one blogger as ‘Digg- the inquisition’. Alternatively, those familiar with the show will understand what I mean when I say it is a DIY variation of BBC’s Question Time. Users not only put questions to public figures but they also vote on which they most want to see answered and get to rate the answers when they come in. It also acts as a fascinating database of questions people want to put to a wide range of public figures.

As well as the belief that in a democratic globalized economy anyone, anywhere should have the right to put a question to those who have power and influence over their lives, Yoosk was also born of a frustration with the media’s response to interactive technology and what can sometimes come across as a rather patronizing and simplistic tone. For example, ‘Have Your Say’ is a common label used for comment sections in online news media. It sounds so indulgent somehow - ‘go on..have your say’ - and for me reflects something of the futility of contributing to comment threads on major news sites.

We also felt interactive media should be setting the bar a bit higher than the current offer of features such as online polls, which are rarely acknowledged as having any validity and tend to give black and white choices which encourage simplistic thinking.

So Yoosk was our response to this- we wanted to develop a range of interactive news features that broke away from the standard polemic of comment sections and try to create dialogue and follow up. We’re calling it news interplay, although the ‘play’ part of that term is not meant to suggest any degree of triviality.

Our story so far is one of constant adaptation in the face of a series of challenges- some foreseen, some unforeseen. Here is a brief run down of what we have learnt in our first months and how our business model has evolved as a result. We still haven’t cracked all the nuts however, and there is one area where we’d like to start a genuine debate- perhaps this post will help kick it off.

Getting questions

We naturally anticipated the difficulties a small start up publication would face in getting answers from high profile leaders and celebrities but what we hadn’t anticipated was the initial difficulty in getting questions from users. Feedback quickly established that visitors need some kind of stimulus to get their ‘questioning juices’ flowing. Often they come to the site, like the idea, but can’t come up with a question straight off. You can’t just say to someone, “hey, think of a question to ask a famous person”. They need to be focused first on a specific issue or person and the question needs to be asked soon after it is raised in a user’s mind.

We’ve addressed this in a number of ways. We started with the creation of Yoosk Features, where site contributors can submit introductory pieces that outline the issues around a particular theme and identify the key players, their position and their influence. These create a focus and have demonstrably helped us get questions on a whole range of issues.

A new feature that has just been launched, the You Ask widget, helps to direct people from news sites to Yoosk while the questions are fresh in their minds. Placed at the bottom of a news article on any site that features or refers to a particular public figure (PF), it links readers directly to that PF’s profile page on Yoosk, where they can put a question to him or her. This widget sits alongside a news site’s comment section and allows a reader to react to a story by asking a follow up question instead of leaving a comment -and all while the topic is still fresh.

We are now talking to major news groups in the UK about placing this widget on their pages- since they have the journalistic resources to get the answers, this kind of partnership makes a lot of sense to us.

Another major initiative to get more questions flowing from visitors is soon to be added to the site. We’ll be inviting guest bloggers to review the day’s news and the questions it raises for them- again, with the aim of stimulating questions while they are on the site. These posts will be features both on the front page and in the different news category sections of the site, as well as on the blogger’s own site. We hope that as Yoosk grows and widens its coverage of issues, the site will start to attract a broad range of contributors.

They’ll never answer

Even before we can stimulate users to ask questions, we need to motivate them. A common response when we first conceived of Yoosk was, ‘the public figures will never answer, so why bother asking’. You could, of course, argue the same thing about comment sites- that they’ll never elicit a response from those at the top. But nonetheless, we knew that this was something we had to really work on. We needed to prove the concept, to show that politicians, celebs and experts would in fact deign to answer questions put to them by the public.

So far we have over 200 answers from around 40 UK based public figures, including high profile politicians, journalists and sports stars. It’s early days, but I think it has proven that there is a real interest among those in the public eye in communicating directly with their constituents, clients or fan bases.

How did we do this? Well, it has been hard work getting these answers. Freelance and student journalists have used up a lot of time and energy on selling the concept. We were lucky to get the help of Neil Thurman, Senior Lecturer in Electronic Publishing at London’s
City University”[http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/news/citizen.html]. Neil quickly saw the value of having his students work with us to develop Yoosk Features. The work the students did was very valuable to us and I think provides a good model for how digital media start ups and universities can work together for mutual benefit.

Go local

We realized very quickly what seems obvious in retrospect- that the more local (and therefore lower profile) the public figure, the more they are accessible and hungry for publicity of any kind. So we are now concentrating on building Yoosk from the bottom up, positioning it as a grass roots local media tool, as well as looking to use partnerships with major media companies to get answers at the national level. We have already had interest from a number of local news organizations to white label Yoosk, using their own journalists to get the answers, while we maintain the database and add new features. This will also help keep the content relevant to the site’s readers. Ultimately, we hope to see hundreds of local Yoosk’s, working in partnership with local news media to make a real difference to the dialogue within a community.

Read more

The bad news is, I’ve been very busy. The good news: I’m busy organizing the first Networked Journalism Summit with Jeff Jarvis. It will hopefully be a great event that leads to more projects for NewAssignment.Net. You can see the work I’m doing at the News Innovation blog where there is even an interview I posted of boss Rosen, who will be a featured speaker. In the meantime - I often get notes from people who are organizing their own crowdsourced/networked journalism projects. NewAssignment.Net isn’t just dedicated to experiments that we organize - we also want to be a community place for people who are organizing projects themselves, or citizen journalists looking for something to get involved with. As such - if you have a call for volunteers, send them to me (Dcohn1 AT gmail Dot com) and perhaps we can give you a shout out.

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Today’s Call

The Fray, organized by Assignment Zero alumni Derek Powazek is looking for contributors for their first issue “Busted.” More info.

Off The Bus our own project is still looking for contributors. If you are interested, let me know - I’m not in the day-to-day, but I’ll gladly put you in touch.

Finally: The big call for the day:
Are You Being Gouged?

WNYC’s latest crowdsourcing project asks listeners to go to their local grocery store and find out the price of three goods: milk, lettuce and beer. You don’t have to buy them (or consume them), but we want to know how much they cost in different neighborhoods throughout the New York area.

Here’s the assignment:

Words often do much more than we intend. They are uncontrollable, taking a life of their own in the readers mind and the cultural nuances that readers engage in. They echo between readers, changing from sender to receiver -- like a giant game of telephone. Because everyone can have a voice on the Internet, that echo chamber can produce a lot of noise. In the end, a general consensus is usually reached, but not always without debate. (See note at the end about Wikipedia)

There are a lot of words I hear regularly in my recent field of work, where I'm lucky enough to work with people like Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis and I can approach older (read: wiser) people in journalism like Leonard Witt and Dan Gillmore. "Community" is one of those words and I took a playful look at it last week by creating a Community Dream Team.

Since citizen media is an oft talked about subject, I do think distinctions should be made so people can clearly understand what they are referring to when they talk to each other. JD Lasica started an interesting conversation about the terms "citizen media," "social media" and "grassroots media," which itself needs to be hashed out. What I will be focusing on in this post is "citizen journalism" -- which is a subset of the larger conversation surrounding social media that JD was talking about.

"Citizen journalism" remains somewhat of a vague but very charged term. What intrigues me about the word and why I believe it is so vague are the various synonyms it has. "Participatory journalism," "stand-alone journalism," "network journalism," "open source journalism," "distributed reporting": Without reflection, they all mean the same thing and are used interchangingly by most people -- where citizens play an active or integral role in the collection, reporting, distilling, filtering and broadcasting of news and information.

So why do we have so many terms for this? For starters "citizen journalism" itself is pretty broad and can include many acts. Jeff Jarvis has posited replacing the term "citizen journalism" with "network journalism." I do think network journalism should enter the lexicon of citizen media more, but I don't know if it should replace "citizen journalism." What I suggest is a further refining of the various types of citizen journalism acts.

Take for example a car crash. People who might be walking by take photos with their phones (not an unheard of act) and then post them on their blog. Who knows, maybe through NowPublic their photos will even end up on the AP. Citizen journalism? -- Of course.

Contrast that with Assignment Zero, a collaborative effort between NewAssignment.Net, Wired News and "anyone else that participated." For four months the Assignment Zero community worked on one story, collecting 80 interviews and producing eight feature articles. Citizen journalism? -- Of course.

But these two acts of "citizen journalism" are incredibly different. The first was sporadic, spur of the moment and the act of an isolated individual. The former, a collaboration over time that required dedication and commitment.

Both are labeled "citizen journalism" because the rhetoric surrounding "citizen journalism" has yet to really grow into its own. There is no vocabulary to articulate different acts of citizen journalism. How do we distinguish these two acts from another?

The first example (the car crash) seems like an act of "Citizen Journalism" (with a big C). A person going about their day who witnesses an event, captures it and broadcasts it. It was not, however, a planned decision. The individual didn't go out with their camerae with the intention of reporting. It just happened to work out that way. NowPublic currently rests its fate on citizen journalism and it is coming close to a critical mass of people who will engage in acts of citizen journalism on its behalf (NowPublic also relies on stand-alone journalism, which I'll define later).

In the case of Assignment Zero, however, people were engaging in "Network Journalism." They were coming together for a purpose. I don't believe "network journalism" has reached its full potential yet, but I'm optimistic.

I don't claim to be the expert or the person who should define these terms. But, I do enjoy trying to make distinctions in my own mind, it's fun and hey, it's my blog. If you don't like it. Piss off (or leave a comment to give your own opinion).

These definitions are in large part inspired and playing off of Steve Outing's Poynter post 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism.

Citizen Journalism: An umbrella term, without a doubt, citizen journalism is when a person who does not make their living as a journalist engages in an act of journalism. Simple enough right? Again, this is a broad definition, which means citizen journalism encompasses all the other acts of journalism that will be described below. But not all acts of citizen journalism are necessarily "network journalism" or "open source journalism." These are unique types of citizen journalism. Another way to think of it: Citizen Journalism is the class and "network journalism" is a species. SAT Question: Mammal is to Human as Citizen Journalism is to Open Source Journalism.

(More After the Break)

Over at PJNET Leonard Witt has begun blogging about something he calls Representative Journalism.

Meanwhile at Invisible Inkling, Ryan Sholin is harboring on a future blog post, which although still hazy, he refers to as the “What Are You Reporting On?” post.

I think they are talking about the same thing.

Representative journalism, as I understand it, is very similar to what Innocentive has done for science research. (More reading: Our Assignment Zero interview with Alpheus Bingham, co-founder of Innocentive.)

I’d like to add my voice to the chorus. This is a business model that we’ve thrown around as an idea here at NewAssignment.Net — and in truth I think it’s the future of independent investigative journalism. I’m glad Leonard Witt has come up with a name for it. I’ve been struggling myself, often referring to it as “Innocentive journalism.”

The basis of the model is micropayments. Independent journalists post what investigations they want to begin. With the potential investigations posted, individual readers can then decide to donate $10 or so to the investigation they are most interested in. If 300 people donate $10 you have $3,000. That’s not a bad monthly wage for an independent journalist.

The individual funders are what Sellaband, an example of crowdfunding, would call believers. With enough believers, an independent band gets to record an album with SellaBand.

An immediate question that comes up when explaining this model is always “how do you keep the journalist honest.” If a journalist is investigating something with a political slant and is funded by people who want specific results, how can we continue to keep those investigations fair and balanced?

Good question.

First, let’s reconsider the relationship between funder and journalist. It shouldn’t be that the individual funders are trying to hire a journalist to get the “truth” that they are looking for. What they are hiring is an umpire, somebody they can trust to dig deep and find out what’s really happening. That might seem obvious to professional journalists, but whatever example of “Representative Journalism” comes to fruition will have to set that tone.

Second and more importantly, whatever organization creates the means for readers to find and fund journalists will have to be somewhat responsible for the end results. They will have to keep the independent journalists on deadline and working. In a sense, they will be managing editors. And if that means screening the journalists who can propose possible investigations, I’d understand that. Not in an effort to be top-down, but as a means to ensure that people’s money is put to good use.

Benefits: An audience is automatically created. Just like the Spread FireFox campaign, if you donate time or money to something, you are going to use the final product (in this case read the final product) because you feel a sense of ownership.

A marketplace for independent journalists to find funders for the type of journalism they believe in. The bottom line is erased and re-written by popular demand.

A new organization that doesn’t hire journalists, it allows them to make a case for their own work. Jobs might be limited right now, but there is space for anybody who is willing to commit to the job.

Funders/Readers can help with the investigation itself. This is a slippery slope. As we noted above, funders might also have axes to grind, and that is their right as citizens, so when I say they can “help with the investigation,” I am not suggesting they have a role that would compromise the investigation. But I do believe that through the funding process a network would be created and the journalist who is spearheading the investigation could use that network in innovative ways.

Andrew Keen, Clay Shirky, Chris Anderson and company travel the globe debating the cultural transformations spawned by user generated content. As predicted in the writings of these authors, the debate does not conclude after microphones are unplugged. Instead, the discussion continues through a loosely connected array of blog posts, forum threads, YouTube clips, Flickr photos, etc.

For those seeking more active participation in debates surrounding citizen journalism, amateurism, crowdsourcing, or the numerous attached issues, Assignment Zero alum John Eischeid is launching The Cult of the Rebuttal. The collaborative project aims to compile a response to Keen’s diatribe against user generated content through a familiar method…you guessed it – user generated content. For initial guidance, Eischeid segmented the project into likely discussion topics via a blog template (The project also would function as a wiki or comment press site, but the blog works well for familiarity and aesthetics). The following topics are currently available:

* Should we blame the technology or those who use it?
* Analyze the economics.
* What have citizen journalists contributed?
* Investigate the notion of truth in journalism.
* To what extent is vanity also part of our culture?
* CNN – YouTube Presidential debates.
* The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler
* Fact-checking
* Miscellany

Despite the explicit reference to Keen in the title, The Cult of the Rebuttal is constructed to function more as a repository for new media studies than as an attack on one specific work. Including a “Miscellany” section welcomes discussion of other relevant issues, and an additional literary section is already evident through Yochai Benkler’s “The Wealth of Networks.” Lawrence Lessig’s “Free Culture” and David Weinberger’s “Everything is Miscellaneous” would reside comfortably next to Benkler’s piece.

Hopefully an interesting community will develop surrounding The Cult of the Rebuttal, signaling another successful demonstration of an amateur fueled, crowdsourced, opinionative project. Somewhere Andrew Keen is cringing!

As Assignment Zero comes to a rolling halt, discussion this week is focusing on the lessons learned. And rightfully so — that was the point of the project in the first place.

Here are some great reactions to Jeff Howe’s original article which ran in wired.

1. Reportr.Net: Why a failed experiment in crowdsourcing was a success
   “The lesson here for journalism is not so much whether crowdsourcing works, but that failure is not something to be scared off. For journalism to thrive in the future, there is a need for more experimentation, more failure, and ultimately, more successes.”
2. Smart Mobs and Social Synergy: Assignment Zero: Valuable Lessons:
   “’m going to try and catalogue and summarize the lessons in this article as I review it in this blog posting, so:

   * Assignment Zero Lesson #1: Figure out a way to engage participants as soon as they show up.”

3. Mathew Ingram: A “citizen journalism” trifecta of failure:
   “Through some bizarre confluence of events, we have not one but two retrospectives on two separate citizen journalism or “crowdsourced” media projects today — Backfence, which recently announced it was shutting down, and Assignment Zero…”
4. Derek Powazek: Did Assignment Zero Work?
   “o did Assignment Zero Work? I say: Yes. A bunch of people, myself included, were published on Wired.com. Of course it didn’t go perfectly to plan - community projects rarely do. But the AZ editors showed they had what it takes when they reacted to the community needs, narrowed scope, changed the technology, and wound up making something great.”
5. Tish Grier: Assignment Zero Post-Mortem: Participation was Paramount
   “Amanda and I spent many days trying to figure out how to get through to the journalists, and decided it was perhaps better to do what we could to bolster the volunteers (some of the journalists got it—because they had done some interaction already—while others just didn’t.)”
6. Jeff Howe again The Importance of Community
   “Another concept that by all rights should have been more fleshed out in the Wired.com piece was the importance of community. While I’d like to think this idea suffuses the piece, I could probably have been more explicit in noting its importance to making AZ productive.”

And I’m sure there is more: If you find a good piece of analysis — please leave a comment.

Assignment Zero has come to a close. But the lessons learned will be used and re-used.

Today Wired published a piece from Jeff Howe: Did Assignment Zero Fail? A Look Back, and Lessons Learned.

His final assessment: “it might best be considered a highly satisfying failure. It fell far short of the original aim of producing over 80 feature stories, but in over a dozen interviews conducted by phone and e-mail, contributors uniformly described a positive, “though frequently exasperating,” experience.”

As for the work: “I found at least three-quarters of the Q&As to be equal to or exceeding the quality of thought and insight found in any national magazine. And if Assignment Zero failed to clear the especially high bar it set for itself, the fact it produced so large a body of work still speaks to the considerable potential of crowdsourced journalism.”

Read more in the full article.