Thursday, March 15, 2007

AssignmentZero: Pro-Am Journalism Takes off With Launch of Assignment Zero

From AssignmentZero's launch press release:

"Wired News (www.wired.com) and NewAssignment.net today announce the launch of Assignment Zero (www.assignmentzero.com), an attempt to bring together professional writers and editors with citizen journalists to collaborate on reporting and writing about the rise of crowdsourcing on the Web. Inspired by the open source movement, the goal of Assignment Zero is to develop a working model of an open newsroom."

Comment: NewAssignment.net and AssignmentZero are the brainchildren of Jay Rosen (no relation), a professor at my alma mater. I'm very interested in this idea of 'hybrid' journalism, where a professional journalist works with a pool of amateurs. I can't say I'm overly impressed by the current assignments, but I can understand that they want to start with some softball pieces before trying to tackle anything juicier.