Posts about newassignment

Leading up to the Networked Journalism Summit

October 9, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis
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Wednesday morning, the Networked Journalism Summit at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism opens. Students will be liveblogging at the 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 tomorrow’s participants will hear about many other endeavors in other models. I hope they leave with information and inspiration and new ideas to implement and experiment with. When they do, we will report back on their plans and will follow up with progress reports.

My Assignment Zero interview

April 9, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis
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I was interviewed via email for NewAssignment.net’s assignment zero on crowdsourcing by Neal G. Moore, director of community relations at Indiana University’s School of Informatics. I’ll put up the first exchange. If you have better answers — or better questions — please join in.

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Should you choose to accept it….

March 15, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis
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Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is up on NewAssignment.net. This is Jay Rosen’s inspiration brought to life. As he explains the question:

Can large groups of widely scattered people, working together voluntarily on the net, report on something happening in their world right now, and by dividing the work wisely tell the story more completely, while hitting high standards in truth, accuracy and free expression?
If they can, this would matter.

I think they actually bit off a big bite for their first story, their assignment zero, because it’s more qualitative than quantitative, more about interviews and views than numbers and facts. They’re going to assess the impact of crowdsourcing. That comes, I suspect, from the influence of Wired, which was first step up for a joint project. I think the results will be fascinating but also challenging as they figure out how do — and this is Jay’s key inspiration — cut up a story into its elemental bits of reporting and assign those out. Jay again:

We’re going to investigate the growth and spread of crowdsourcing, which overlaps with something called peer production. (Yochai Benkler’s complete term is “commons-based peer production.”) This basically means people making valuable stuff by cooperating online, mainly because they want to and sometimes because they’re paid to assist. . . .

While the geeks invented such practices, first with free software, then with open source, they long ago lost control of them; and today crowdsourcing is on the rise across a wide social landscape, from corporate America and government to arts and crafts. Wikipedia calls this open-source culture.

Collaboration in the open-source diaspora and why it works when it does (plus what it can’t do …), that’s a sprawling and nuanced story with lots of locations. It lies in pieces — and in people who know the practices. There’s also a little mystery at the core of it: Why are these people willing to work for free?

Nuanced, indeed. That’s not as easy an exercise in networked journalism as, say, comparing prices for drugs across the country, one of the early examples thrown out for NewAssignment, or comparing companies’ family policies. But they didn’t go for easy out of the gate. That will make the process as fascinating to watch as the story.

So go dig in. Take an assignment. Pick up your notebook and get out of the newsroom.

Abandoning ship

November 13, 2006 by Jeff Jarvis
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Newspapers — and their readers — should be scared reading Jay Rosen’s interview with John McQuaid, an accomplished reporter — he predicted everything that would happen in Katrina years before — who has given up on working for papers. He is exactly where papers should be putting their investment: in unique reporting, real value for the community. But his investigative role was killed, before Katrina, and he chose not to become a paper-pusher on a desk.

So McQuaid becomes a poster child for newspaper cutbacks done wrong. I have been arguing that cutbacks are a good thing if they are used to boil a paper to its essence, to get rid of the useless stuff and decide what a paper’s real value is: reporting. Cutbacks are bad if they maintain the commodity stuff at the expense of reporting. But all is not lost. McQuaid remains a reporter, only now an independent one. He’s going to contribute to NewAssignment.net. He says:

Newspapers remain key venues for probing, public service-oriented journalism. While the format has its problems–too many dull, interminable series see print mainly as Pulitzer bait–at their best, newspaper series can not only reveal terrible problems and injustices, but also be lively and engaging reading.

Big papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post retain the staff and resources to do these kinds of things. But no matter how important or interesting they are, investigations don’t pay the bills, and in a lot of other places there’s neither the capacity nor the will to delve deeply into both local and national issues. That’s a serious problem, in keeping politicians and other officials honest and in the functioning of democracy itself. So I’d like to help new, Internet-based forums, emerge locally and nationally to do investigative or explanatory journalism. And of course we need readers, advertisers and financial backers to go with them.

This is a great era for news– government accountability has all but disappeared. Doubtless, there are dozens of government meltdowns — on top of the ones that we already know about — already underway or about to happen.

That said, I’m not sure how what this new form will look like. The newspaper investigation is basically a static form: journalists work for weeks or months on a story. For the most part, nobody in the wider world even knows what they’re doing. Then they publish it. It makes a splash (or not). Maybe it has a broad impact. After the publication date, on some basic level, it’s over.

But the web is so dynamic — an ever-unfolding conversation. So I was intrigued by NewAssignment.Net, which offers an opportunity to figure out how to harness that dynamism in the service of journalism.

: LATER: Part two up now.

Networked journalism on the track

November 3, 2006 by Jeff Jarvis
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The new NewAssignment.net site launches today and Tom Evslin writes about a very real networked journalism project to find whether there are the smoking guns of network (non)neutrality lurking in our ISP wires.

The NA.net blog is now filled regularly with reporting about networked reporting: lots of good stuff from founder Jay Rosen and the first editor, David Cohn. Time to add it to your RSS subscriptions.

I’m less enthused about another project they’re involved in: a networked photolog of polling places. Polling places are, by their very nature, excruciatingly dull.

But meanwhile, elsewhere on the frontier, Carnegie, Ford, and Open Society are supporting VoterStory.org, where we are encouraged to go file any tales of voting irregularities. Those tales clearly will need confirmation – that is, reporting.

: LATER: Betsy Devine dispatches people to take pictures of the campaign flyers on car windows at church. More networked journalism, more crowdsourcing.