All the World’s a Story
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.
I will freely admit that I have conflicted feelings about this.
While I find the idea interesting, and can see how it can work (as seen in rare occations with blogs), the examples of the problems with Wikipedia and many blog-based stories shows the potential problems with this idea. There is also a huge potential for ideology coming in the way of the story.
Personally I feel that a similar project using freelance journalists would have a greater potential to succeed.
Other links:
Assignment Zero webpage
Wired article about the subject
Hej Kristjan
ReplyDeleteJeg ved ikke om du har set det, men evolution/ID-filmen Flock of Dodos bliver vist på Natfilm festivalen i Kbh: http://www.natfilm.dk/n/index.lasso?tt=f&s=DEF&ser=336
Instruktøren Randy Olson stiller endda op til en debat med en kreationist den 27, og kommer i Deadline.
Det havde forbigået min opmærksomhed.
ReplyDeleteMange tak fordi du fortalte det - jeg må helt klart ind og se den.
[For the non-Danish speakers, Rasmus was kind enough to bring to my attention that A Flock of Dodos is being shown in Copenhagen in a couple of weeks, and that Randy Olson will be showing up.
I will certainly go and watch it.]