[Web4lib] All the World*s a Story: Assignment Zero

[Gerry Mckiernan]

Colleagues/

The Future of Journalism/Literature?

[The Future of the Journal ?]

[http://disruptivescholarship.blogspot.com/2005/02/disruptive-scholarship-blog-launched_03.html
]

[ http://www.disruptivescholarship.blogspot.com/ ]

Enjoy!

/Gerry 

Gerry McKiernan
Science and Technology Librarian
Iowa State University Library 
Ames IA 50011

gerrymck at iastate.edu 

"The Medium is the Message, * the Audience is the Content.*  
              Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) 
             [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan ]
 
Marshall McLuhan. _Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man_.  (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), PAGE?.
 [http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/ ]
 
*Hot media are * low in participation, Cool media are high in
participation or completion  by the audience.*  
Marshall McLuhan. _Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man_.  (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 23. 

**************************************************************************************

March 19, 2007
The Media Equation
All the World*s a Story 
By DAVID CARR
Journalism has always been a product of networks. A reporter receives
an assignment, begins calling *sources* - people he or she knows or
can find. More calls follow and, with luck and a deadline looming, the
reporter will gain enough mastery of the topic to sit down at a keyboard
and tell the world a story.

A new experiment wants to broaden the network to include readers and
their sources. Assignment Zero (zero.newassignment.net/), a
collaboration between Wired magazine and NewAssignment.Net, the
experimental journalism site established by Jay Rosen, a professor of
journalism at New York University, intends to use not only the wisdom of
the crowd, but their combined reporting efforts - an approach that has
come to be called *crowdsourcing.*

The idea is to apply to journalism the same open-source model of
Web-enabled collaboration that produced the operating system Linux, the
Web browser Mozilla and the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. 

Assignment Zero will use custom software to create a virtual newsroom
that allows collaboration on a discrete, but open-ended, topic from the
very start. 

In this instance, the topic will be be crowdsourcing, so the phenomenon
will be used to cover the phenomenon itself. Citizens with a variety of
expertise * the *people formerly known as the audience,* as
Professor Rosen describes them * will produce work to be iterated and
edited by experienced journalists

[snip]

But the largest share of the reporting is the responsibility to folks
who simply raised their hands. In the next few months, deadlines will
loom for the citizen journalists, copy will be edited and articles will
appear at NewAssignment.net site. A few of those might even make it into
Wired magazine, according to Chris Anderson, the editor.

[snip]

The Web has transformed a lot of things, including journalism, turning
it into a self-cleaning and occasionally overheated oven. Those of us
who perpetrate journalism know in our hearts that it is a craft, not a
profession, one that requires a finite set of skills to do competently
and a lot of passion to do well.

[ http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/19/business/media/19carr.html ]