Assignment Zero
Here's Jay Rosen's Wired piece on Assignment Zero. Here's the key blog that Jay says is the way to keep in touch with the project.
In the last week, 650 people have joined the team. They're looking for assignments and ready to go — the first meta story is about the crowdsourcing phenomenon itself. So yesterday someone noted that the 3,000 US Attorney-firing-related emails had been extensively dug through by the online world just after their release. That's a story. And they're planning to interview key crowdsourcing people and entities. It's a sprawling, lively, idealistic, graphically-pleasing project, and it's just getting started.
I love it when the NY Times arrives at my doorstep every morning, and I never want to miss it. But Jay's “pro-am” work is inspiring and will likely produce unexpected and rich results. As he says:
In this project, we're trying to crowdsource a single story, and debut a site that makes other such reports possible down the road. But we don't know yet how well our site and our methods work. Our ideas are crude because they are untested. By participating, you can help us figure this puzzle out.
This is exciting, but it needs critical mass. They've got professionals there to sift, assign, and help edit. If you've got any interest, try the amateur role. Help Assignment Zero collectively figure out how to harness the power of minds online to produce a new kind of journalism.
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