Nov 14th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
NewAssignment.net creator and journalism prof Jay Rosen’s latest venture just went live: Beatblogging is an attempt to improve the coverage of specific news areas or “beats” by using social-media such as blogs and wikis. In effect, Jay and his team — led by the indefatigable David “DigiDave” Cohn — want to help beat reporters use “crowdsourcing” methods (like Jay’s project with Huffington Post, the political-reporting effort OffTheBus.com) to draw knowledge from various sources.
The list of 13 participants is at Jay’s site, PressThink, and also at the MediaShift Idea Lab site that is part of PBS. It includes Wired digital-music writer Eliot Van Buskirk, a science reporter at the Houston Chronicle, a public-school reporter at the Dallas Morning News, a basketball writer at ESPN.com and a technology reporter at the Seattle Times. The San Jose Mercury News has some thoughts about why it’s taking part.
I think Jay’s idea is brilliant, and it will be fascinating to see how it develops. I wish there were some Canadian newspaper reporters taking part.
Oct 16th, 2007 | Citizen Media, Media 2.0 | No Comments
I’ve been meaning to get to this for days now, but I wanted to post about Jay Rosen’s lessons from Assignment Zero, the “crowdsourcing” journalism experiment he put together between his NewAssignment project and Wired magazine, with help from a team of people that included Dave “Digi-Dave” Cohn and Tish Grier. On a related note, Dave has also been working with Jeff Jarvis on the Networked Journalism mini-conference Jeff just finished putting together, and has a list of interviews with people who are involved in what might broadly be called social media in one way or another.
Among other things, Jeff admits that the trend story that Assignment Zero chose to focus its efforts on — the impact of crowdsourcing itself, and other “open source” approaches to media — was a little too “meta” and a little too big and subjective for the first project. And he quotes from Derek Powazek’s advice in his review of Assignment Zero lessons (which is here):
“Start with clear, simple tasks. This isn’t because the crowd can’t handle complicated ones - they can - it’s because they haven’t decided if it’s worth doing them for you yet.
People won’t do what you say because you just told them to. You have to inspire them to want to participate.”
Many of the issues that came up with Assignment Zero (and Wired writer Jeff Howe has his own take on the lessons here and here) didn’t have to do with the idea or even the execution so much as the co-ordination of volunteers and contributors. Finding out what people’s motivations are, how much they can do, what they want to do, and then dividing the work up amongst them is hard, Jay says.
“Dividing up the work into tasks people can and will do is among the trickiest decisions the project will have. Expectations have to be extremely clear or a crowd will generate a limitless number of honest misunderstandings.”
One of the potential solutions Jay talks about is having what the open-source movement calls “super-contributors,” whose job it is to help find and co-ordinate other contributors. While he says Assignment Zero did not “crack this case,” Jay told me that he thinks Off The Bus — the networked journalism project that NewAssignment is working on with The Huffington Post — is closer to a solution.
Assignment Zero and Off The Bus co-ordinator Amanda Michel writes a bit about participation levels here, and gives an example of the work Off The Bus is doing with “citizen journalists” here.
Jul 9th, 2007 | Citizen Media, Media 2.0 | No Comments
Wired magazine is running some of the stories that have been produced by Assignment Zero — the first “crowdsourcing” journalism experiment from Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.net and Wired writer (and mesh panelist) Jeff Howe — and one of the first is a piece by Anna Haynes about just how difficult the entire process has been. As she describes it:
“The results of my efforts were mixed. Some parts were rewarding: I enjoyed digging to uncover lobbyist connections to earmarked appropriations in the Earmarks Project, plus there’s a certain satisfaction in publicly exposing stonewalling, and a different satisfaction in finally getting an answer.
But I contribute to crowdsourced journalism because I want my work to yield a high “social good” return, and by that metric, overall, the experience has been frustrating. With some of these projects I ended up with nothing to show for the time I put in.”
In the end, however, Anna says that she believes it was worth it — and that more of it needs to happen:
I did it, and will continue doing it, for the same reason that you keep going out on dates even though the first six guys didn’t measure up — you know there’s potential to the form, you want that potential to be realized, and you’re pretty sure that, if you keep plugging away and you put the word out, in time that potential will blossom.
Apr 17th, 2007 | Blogs, Citizen Media | No Comments
As horrific as the circumstances at Virginia Tech were, as a journalist it was fascinating to watch the information about the shootings filter out through the students and faculty at the college, by way cellphones and webcams, blogs and Facebook accounts, Flickr photos and LiveJournal updates. The Wikipedia page was updated minute by minute (the page of edits makes for interesting reading). Another example of “crowdsourcing” the news.
As others have described elsewhere, Jamal Albarghouti recorded gunfire on his cellphone and had it run on CNN and dozens of other networks and channels; Professor Dennis Hong set up a webcam on the windowsill of his classroom and then streamed the video of police activity to the frightened students inside a locked-down lab; other students uploaded photos to Flickr and their Facebook accounts. One Facebook group set up in memory of those killed had more than 17,000 members within hours of the shooting and now has over 96,000 members and 9,000 “wall” posts or messages.
Several students blogged about what was going on, reassuring friends and relatives that they were safe. The Roanoke Times ran a blog-style update story, a smart response to the event, and the Collegiate Times was providing regular updates as well. Not surprisingly, people started using the Net to search for the identity of the shooter — and came up with the wrong guy, as described by Wired’s Threat Level blog.
A failing of crowdsourced journalism? Perhaps. But as Robert Niles of the Online Journalism Review pointed out, traditional media muffs the details in the heat of the moment too — and takes longer to correct those mistakes.
Dec 10th, 2006 | Citizen Media | No Comments
From Muhammad Saleem at The Mu Life (who noticed the item on HTMKSteve’s blog), comes news of a paper in Connecticut that is looking to hire an editor to bring together “user-generated content” from the community. The classified ad at Journalism Jobs says:
The News-Times seeks someone with print and online skills to solicit, gather, assemble and strategically publish user-generated content on our Web site and in our niche publications… You will gather and compile everything from Little League pictures to prom photo galleries to audio/video narrations from veterans of war and undercover cops. Some writing will be required but that’s a minor part of the job.
As Muhammad — a top contributor to Digg and a paid contributor at Netscape — points out in his blog post, this is very similar to the kind of thing that “anchors” and editors at Netscape get paid ($1,000 a month) to do. And what is the pay scale for the News-Times job? It says just that it’s “negotiable.”
I wonder how long before the users who generate all that “user-generated content” are going to start asking the paper for their cut of the proceeds.
