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March 19, 2007
Assignment Zero, Day Six: Help Wanted SectionI'm looking for amateur-friendly pros who can work with the people who have joined up with us. Five days ago we launched AZ. We now have 450 contributors--each with a profile and a blog--slowly filtering into the site. What do we do now? they're asking. That's where you come in...“We’re going to take one big, moving story—the spread of crowdsourcing and peer production methods across wired society—and with your active assistance break it down into reportable parts,” I wrote at Wired.com last week. “Some of these parts we already have. More of them is what we need. Then we’re going to develop those parts — in the open, at the site — into pieces we can formally assign to contributors.” It is a hybrid form of journalism—pro-am, I call it—now playing at our site. So far there’s been strong response from the am side. We had 450 volunteers by Sunday. We will soon have 500 people who have joined Assignment Zero and our partnership with Wired. That means they’re willing to contribute to the nuanced telling of one sprawling (but manageable) trend story. In this we’re ahead of where I thought we would be. And so today I need to recruit more pros who can work with the Assignment Zero team, and with contributors like Michael Ho, who joined up over the weekend. He says he works in IT but had an interest in journalism back in college. “I am a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area and would be able to assist you with background or interviews throughout the area.” Exactly. Put a pin in the map. Now that we have Michael Ho interested and able to assist, we need to get him something to do that advances the story. (A newsroom phrase I like.) But that’s not enough. The small piece he’s working on has to clearly connect with the larger narrative. The beta site we launched last week has most of the architecture required for breaking a big story into parts so contributors can improve those parts. (The developers were ChapterThree, specialists in open practice.) But the site needs a lot of work. It also generates a lot of work when people start using it. Lauren Sandler, the editor of Assignment Zero, can’t easily guide 500-plus contributors to their best contributions and 75-plus pieces to completion. She needs help. I’m betting there are curious professionals out there who would like to contribute on a voluntary basis. I mean experienced and talented journalists who…
HELP WANTED 1. Editors who can provide oversight of topic pages as they evolve from suggestions into stories in our open newsroom. An example of a topic is No. 669 on Crowd Sourced Film. Right now the page is quite undeveloped. For Assignment Zero to work these topic home pages have to be way more effective. The idea is that some in our swarm of 500 will want to contribute what they know about crowd-sourced film (as I did here.) Meanwhile, if those who love indie film gravitate toward their interests, they’ll find topic 669. We have to be ready with our Things to Do list when they land on this page— which we will re-tool and develop as soon as we can. But mostly we need someone to care for it, and work with contributors who want to add to a story percolating there. 2. Reporters who can work on the right side of a page like this one. It’s 583, Open Source Religion. Is there anything to it? This is typical of what the ams can help us find out. See that list on the right? (“Sketch out the big picture.”) Right now it’s pretty weak. But a reporter with experience covering religion could make it a whole lot better. We need people like that. 3. Web-savvy journalists with multiple skills who can learn our system quickly and solve problems, put out fires and handle discrete tasks for editor Lauren Sandler, who is learning as she goes. (Fast.) You simply report for duty and she assigns you to work needed now. A lot of it will be communicating with “am” contributors so they know what to do and can do it. Here we need pros who are flexible and play well with others. Willing to be sent where needed. You have to be able to work independently, and report in with updates. 4. You don’t have to be a journalist for this category. Amanda Michel is not a journalist. She’s Director of Participation for NewAssignment.Net. Her background is in online organizing. As DP for Assignment Zero, it’s her job to solve the problems people have when they try to contribute. She’s supposed to lower the barriers to entry for the people we want to attract, and actively recruit new people, while equipping the ones we have with better and better tools. (As well as voice.) Big job. Impossible without help, especially when you have a team of 500-plus people. What kind of help? Super organized people with experience on the net. People who are good at meshing with volunteers. People who have worked with teams to collaborate via the web, and who know how to keep track of complex projects with many players. Journalism by the many, edited by a few, requires great efficiency and strong systems. Help us out if you understand what’s required. Do I have your interest? EDITORS: Volunteer your editorial eye and oversee, O-fficially, one or more topic pages for us. Just send me an email telling me who you are, and where your interests lie. Reality check: seven hours a week to devote to it should be enough for one page (… ten is better.) We’d like to know what you can donate per week for the next 5, 6, 7 weeks. And a bit about why you’re interested in making a contribution like that. Retired from the game with strong editing experience and good Web literacy? We’re interested. REPORTERS: Donate to Assignment Zero your reporting skills and sense. You’ll be helping to scope out a story and break it down, which means right-sizing Things to Do for our crowd of contributors (while taking their suggestions) and sorting them into two kinds…
We want you to help develop bite-sized reporting tasks in both categories for distribution through the Assignment Desk. Do some of the reporting yourself, and show contributors your tricks. Comment on what they are doing. Work with them backstage. We anticipate that volunteers will want to learn from you, as this is one of the benefits of the pro-am style. For experienced reporters thinking about raising a hand, five to seven hours a week would be enough of a donation for you to materially help us, and get something out of it. Send me an email telling me who you are, what you have done, and why you want to join up with Assignment Zero. My best guess is it will be frustrating (because we’re at such a crude stage) and fun (because we’re at such an early stage.) WEB JOURNALISTS with flexible skills. Ready for some serious real time philanthropy? Donate free hours to editor Lauren Sandler, and let her deploy you where you are urgently needed. Just write me an email telling me who you are, and why this sounds like something you’d want to do. SUPERBLY ORGANIZED PEOPLE with Net sense and common sense. Volunteer to work with Amanda Michel, director of participation, as she figures out the social architecture we need to do this assignment. Its not obvious how you organize a big meet-up in editorial space with a moving story, an open platform and hundreds of amateur contributors. Can you assist? Send me an email and explain all. I will forward it on to Amanda. COMPANIES, PROFESSIONAL NEWS ORGANIZATIONS. Give us one of your staffers, a journalist who is most interested in Assignment Zero. Let him or her work for us for a while, and we’ll return to you a journalist more educated in the possibilities in many-to-many reporting and pro-am investigation. Deal? Write me with an idea. DRUPAL DEVELOPERS with a feel for what we’re up to. Help! Work with me and, possibly, Chapterthree as we try to make this site rock. There’s a lot to do. (And check out the critique from Andrew Nachison: “I’ve had this feeling before with sites built on Drupal - a powerful open-source publishing system that seems to inspire complicated sites.”) FINALLY, FUNDERS: We need $1.5 million over two years; we’ve raised about $450,000 of that. Take a look at who’s supporting us— MacArthur Foundation, Craig Newmark, Reuters among them. Do contact me if you can assist. After Matter: Notes, reactions & links… For his media business column in the New York Times (March 19) David Carr wrote about Assignment Zero. I liked this part, about readers knowing more than Carr… This past season, I wrote a blog about the movie business that would flick at topics that I was either too uninformed about or too hard-pressed to nail down. Inevitably, readers would begin buzzing around in comments, a hive that sent out a swarm that eventually, through conversation, argument and annotation, yielded valuable insights and hard facts. That would be his Carpetbagger blog, about the Oscars and more. One of the first serious attempts at doing a blog for the New York Times. A lot of people have been telling me about the “readers know more than we do” reporting that Josh Marshall and his gang have been doing so successfully at Talking Points Memo and TPM Muckraker. Well, yeah. I have been writing about Marshall’s methods since 2004. Here’s a recent Los Angeles Times article about his success. And here’s Paul Kiel at TPR Muckraker (March 20), discussing how to sort through 3,000 pages of emails released by the White House in the ongoing scandal over the firing of United States Attorneys: Josh and I were just discussing how in the world we are ever going to make our way through 3,000 pages when it hit us: we don’t have to. Our readers can help. In my introduction at Wired I wrote: An “author” in our system can be an individual writer, a two- or three-person team. A class could get an assignment. A blog, plus users, could do one Well, Debbie Galant and Liz George of the pioneering local news site, Baristanet (Montclair, NJ, and environs) announced today that they will run to daylight with Assignment Zero. (Both have written for PressThink.) They and their readers—which include a lot of writers—plus anyone else who wants to join will tackle… Crowd sourced traffic and transit. Can commuters avoid jams by going peer to peer? From Baristanet today. Our friend NYU J-school prof Jay Rosen has just hung a great big “help wanted” sign on his blog. He’s looking for journalism pros to volunteer to join the biggest reporting team in the history of journalism. I look forward to working with Debbie and Liz, two of the most creative Web journalists I know. Those testy copy editors get all cranky on AZ. Lauren Sandler on Carr’s column… “I wanted to know, after the sheer amount of reporting I knew he had put into this 1,004 word column, what he opted to quote or directly reference and what simply informed his writing and thinking about what we were doing.”
Posted by Jay Rosen at March 19, 2007 7:06 AM
Comments
Folks, you might want to try posting these "job openings" over in Bangalore. Seems like a better fit, salary-wise and such. Posted by: Peter Fisk at March 19, 2007 5:44 PM | Permalink Mr. Rosen, You probably don't remember me but I accosted you over in AssignmentZero territory with some pretty broad strokes and very little deference. I apologize. Now that I have read your Intro to PressThink I realize you are a man after my own heart. You are the second person I have run into in 30 years whose writing I almost recognize as my own. The last time it was Bob Hull of Cuyahoga Falls, Oh. I threatened to sue him for stealing my style and he later included me in one of his epic regional histories. I now have great respect for you and pledge my obedient service to your AZ undertaking. If I can help let me know. I am enjoying both the Newsvine and the AZ side of my participation. Posted by: Jerry Firman at March 19, 2007 9:34 PM | Permalink I appreciate that, Jerry. Thanks. When I have something right for you I will let you know. Peter: I think your reference to Bangalore is cheap. But this project is not. It will probably cost more than $40,000 all told. Jobs shift to Bangalore when production is cheaper there. Do you think that's a threat in this case? Jay: You say here in the comments section that the project "will probably cost more than $40,000 all told," but you stated above that you've already raised $450,000 and that you are seeking a total of $1.5 million over two years. Please clarify those numbers, and also please give us a better idea of what $1.5 million is needed for if the workers won't be receiving any compensation. You used the word "philanthropy" in describing the volunteer work that professional journalists would be doing for you. Is your organization registered as a nonprofit charity? Will you be selling ad space? If so, how will that ad revenue be spent? Thanks, Jay. People will likely want to know the answers to these and other questions in deciding whether to volunteer their time and talent for your project. Posted by: Peter Fisk at March 20, 2007 11:16 AM | Permalink Please clarify those numbers, and also please give us a better idea of what $1.5 million is needed for if the workers won't be receiving any compensation. Is your organization registered as a nonprofit charity? Legally speaking, NewAssignment.Net is a research project of mine at NYU, and NYU is a registered non-profit, so dollar contributions to NewAssignment.Net are charitable contributions. Will you be selling ad space? If so, how will that ad revenue be spent? No. At this time we are not. And I do not have plans to sell ads. If we ever did, we would have to figure out some revenue split. And... "Peter Fisk"... How's about answering my question? I assume that's a clever pen name. But you aren't a one-way medium, are you? I said Wired has spent close to $40,000 on production and will get, in commodity terms, one cover story and some exciting sidebar material out of it. Modest bump in traffic is possible, but not a factor in the financial equation. Overall they are a net sender of traffic to NewAssignment, not the other way around. Jobs shift to Bangalore when production is cheaper there. I asked you: Do you think that's a threat in this case? Are there people in the news industry eyeballing this very project and salivating over the cost cuts they could wring? Definitely. It's no secret that such people exist in the biz. I know from my own correspondence that they're aware of what we're doing. They might have that dream. But they should talk to Evan Hansen of Wired. My long-term goal is to pay for certain levels of quality, which really means degree of difficulty. If you publish with us a kick-ass, crowd sourced, heavily reported Q and A, we pay you for that. We pay if you're a "pro," we pay if you're an "am," we pay if you're a cactus bush. We're not there yet. But we're not in Bangalore. Jay, instead of AZ (which I confuse with the Post Office's state code for Arizona), how about A∅? Jobs shift to Bangalore when production is cheaper there. I asked you: Do you think that's a threat in this case? Jay: I didn't answer that question because its meaning is unclear. If the question means A.) Is there a market incentive to move these proposed zero-compensation journalism jobs to India?, I reckon the answer would be no, these non-paying jobs would probably be pretty safe from offshoring. (And presumably, if U.S. autoworkers decided to work for free building cars in people's back yards ... well, never mind.) If the question means B.) Is there a chance that it would be cheaper to move Assignment Zero's headquarters and its handful of paid top-managerial jobs to India?, I would have to say yes, that seems like something to watch out for. Or is there some other meaning in your question that isn't coming across? p.s. My dad says thanks for the kind words about my name, but he's not sure what's so clever about it. Seemed pretty straightforward at the time, he says. Posted by: Peter Fisk at March 20, 2007 3:11 PM | Permalink Thanks for correcting me: Peter Fisk is no pen name. Jay: I don't question your motives. I'm just trying to understand a few things. Like, why would professional journalists *want* to donate their time and effort to something like this? … How could you ensure that the information you publish is accurate, fair and useful? ... How will you ensure that the project isn’t infiltrated and manipulated by the PR departments of large corporations to serve their own narrow self-interests? How will you know if some of your news "contributors" aren't really just flacks for, say, Exxon and Halliburton? Posted by: Peter Fisk at March 20, 2007 5:32 PM | Permalink And what happens if you publish libelous material submitted by your citizen journalists? Who gets sued? Who's accountable? Posted by: Peter Fisk at March 20, 2007 5:42 PM | Permalink Why would professional journalists *want* to donate their time and effort to something like this? That's something you can ask some of the 25 or so pros who wrote to me, once they are up and visible on the site. How could you ensure that the information you publish is accurate, fair and useful? How will you ensure that the project isn't infiltrated and manipulated by the PR departments of large corporations to serve their own narrow self-interests? Could happen. I mean I wouldn't rule it out. We'll guard against it in every way we can. Editors on the lookout, fact checkers swarming over the story before publication. We'll ask any contributor who gets a by-line whether they have an interest or stake in the story and if the plant/flack says no and we discover the answer is "yes," that's a PR disaster for the firm involved because we will make noise about it. That will deter some. And what happens if you publish libelous material submitted by your citizen journalists? We're an edited publication that tries very hard not to do that. Who gets sued? I think that's a question best directed to the imaginary plaintiff's attorneys. An attorney can try to sue almost anyone, as I'm sure you know. Who's accountable? Editors are responsible for edited content and what they write, contributors are accountable for what they post. "Debbie Galant and Liz George of...Baristanet ...announced today that they will run to daylight with Assignment Zero." for the sports-challenged, definitions from the web: Run to Daylight (football term suggesting one should focus all efforts on the option most likely to produce success) 'run to daylight' verb: to run a path that goes slightly backward and away from the line of scrimmage before coming back toward the line of scrimmage as in a swing pass route ...Boston where we warn out-of-state drivers that an amber light means that five cars will go through...and a red light will mean two more. In Boston, the football term: "Run to daylight" has a vehicular meaning. Posted by: anna haynes at March 28, 2007 3:06 PM | Permalink |
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