Around the Net

Use The World, Tell A Story

Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, is applying the wiki principle to journalism, bringing the wisdom of crowds to news reporting in a new project called "Assignment Zero," a collaboration between Wired Magazine and NewAssignment.Net, his experimental journalism site.

In a Wired report published last week, Rosen wonders if large groups of people can work together on the Net, report on events in their world by dividing the work yet hit high standards for truth and accuracy.

At a time when YouTube is fostering free expression by eliminating traditional barriers to entry, journalism is still dominated by professionals. Sure, there are bloggers, but their rise to prominence has similarly been limited to the oversight of small groups, and in most cases, one person. Rosen's idea is to call upon the masses to do the grunt work--that is, the reporting--to generate a more comprehensive overview of a given topic. Journalists would then be the editor-gatekeepers, fact-checking and editing for errors. It's a cool idea that's useful to the telling of a broad story, but what gets left behind--especially given the age of instant information--is timeliness. How Rosen plans to get such a broad collective effort to deliver information quickly is unclear. It sounds like this would become a series of retrospective thought-pieces.

Read the whole story at The New York Times »

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