Assignment Zero Tests Pro-Am Journalism

Jay Rosen writes "Assignment Zero is a pro-am, open-platform reporting project. The investigation: crowd sourcing and peer production are a social trend growing well beyond tech. Why is this happening? Partners: NewAssignment.Net and Wired.com, with Newsvine. From the Wired essay: 'We're trying to figure something out here. 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?' Wired.com: 'We want out readers and our sources to be one and the same. We think it will make for better journalism.'"

Comments

Nah, Slashdot is mostly PR pieces...

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

Nah, these days Slashdot is mostly PR pieces for large corporations. Here's a couple of "articles" cut and pasted from the desks of professional PR flaks:

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/23/134 6225
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/04/ 194245
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/06/193720 0

Re:A higher calling.

[theantipop]

Your prime example here also highlights the limitations of staff-moderated systems. Yet you can look at Digg and see the perversions that occur in user-moderated scenarios. Which is better? Neither, both? I think Firehose may turn out to be a balanced mix of the two, but time will tell.