GUILLERMO WECHSLER

December 3, 2006

An Open Source Journalism Experiment

Jay Rosen, an Associate Professor of Journalism of NYU, spoke recently at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society about his new project, NewAssignment.net.

NewAssignment.net is an experiment about how to build the community, roles, and practices of Open Source Journalism. How do you build this "game"? What are the rules? How can the players win?

I am exploring two categories of Rosen's questions: the players' concerns, and commitment.

1. Rosen has questions about the division of labor for all the different people coming into Open Source Journalism who have different concerns. How do we understand the concerns (what they call motivations) of the different players: professional journalists, freelancers, amateurs for no pay, people trying to become journalists and make a name for themselves?


2. Rosen talks about building some sort of hierarchial structure in this collective in which there will be editors who set deadlines. And the deadlines are part of the incentive to keep writers going. He discusses how certain writers will be preferred based on their commitment to the deadlines and their know-how to write good stories. He mentions tracking the commitments of the reporters as a possible step forward. He also opens up the question of how to track the assertions of the stories: How do you rate the data that people use? How do you build a structure to fact-check

All of this is new and Rosen says his goal of this experiment is to see what new knowledge can come from it. What can we learn? As he opened these questions, I would like to do the same here. How do we understand what is happening at NewAssignment.net and how can we collectively move here to produce an interesting and valuable collective?