PressThink: Introducing NewAssignment.Net

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Saved by 19 people (-2 private), first by anonymouse user on 2006-07-27

Pepagarcia on 2007-09-06 - Tags artículos , periodismo_ciudadano , vest
Tigerbyte on 2007-06-25 - Tags blog , del.icio.us , imported , media , news , social
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Nona7579 on 2006-11-13 - Tags opensource , journalism , media , news , bpdel

Public Comment

on 2006-07-27 by bhooqui

Donation-based independent journalism. Order a NON-mainstream report on something that really matters.

on 2006-08-04 by mattmcalister

Reporters working with smart users and blogging editors get the story the pack wouldn’t, couldn’t or didn’t.

Public Sticky notes

How did you get started on this idea?

By thinking about what happened to Chris Allbritton, the former AP reporter who got a blog and used it to cover the war in Iraq as the United States forces descended on that country in 2003. Allbritton raised $14,500 from 342 donors on a simple promise: send back from the war original and honest reporting, free of commercial pressures, pack thinking and patriotic hype. That was the assignment. It was new because it didn’t involve the media at all, but it was real journalism: war correspondence with an intimate feel.

Allbritton needed a plane ticket to Turkey (where he snuck over the border and found the war) a laptop, a Global Positioning Satellite unit, a rented satellite phone, a digital camera, enough cash to move around, keep fed and buy his way out of trouble. He went as an independent, representing only his readers, his backers, himself. He never asked permission to be in the country. He just went. The law was changing hands anyway.

On March 27, 2003 his reporting drew 23,000 users to his site, Back to Iraq. That was NewAssignment.Net in improvised form, because the journalist and a “paying” public got together and pulled it off. The people formerly known as the audience could, in a sense, hire their own journalist. Allbritton showed that it was possible; and I wrote about what he did in Columbia Journalism Review.

But I kept thinking about that episode because the implications were large. Alert publics hire their own correspondents and share the results with the world, cutting “the media” out entirely. This had promise. Meanwhile, Chris started stringing for Time magazine, and eventually became a Middle East Correspondent based in Beirut.

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Dan Gillmor of Berkeley’s Center for Citizens Media is an adviser to NewAssignment.Net. He e-mails: “I continue to believe that the people who could pull this off best are the traditional media

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Enterprise reporting goes pro-am. Assignments are open sourced. They begin online. Reporters working with smart users and blogging editors get the story the pack wouldn’t, couldn’t or didn’t. They raise the money too. Q and A explains. There's $10,000 to test it, courtesy of Craig Newmark. Alright, what is it? In simplest terms, a way to fund high-quality, original reporting, in any medium, through donations to a non-profit called NewAssignment.Net. The site uses open source methods to develop good assignments and help bring them to completion; it employs professional journalists to carry the project home and set high standards so the work holds up. There are accountability and reputation systems built in that should make the system reliable. The betting is that (some) people will donate to works they can see are going to be great because the open source methods allow for that glimpse ahead. In this sense it’s not like donating to your local NPR station, because your local NPR station says, “thank you very much, our professionals will take it from here.” And they do that very well. New Assignment says: here’s the story so far. We’ve collected a lot of good information. Add your knowledge and make it better. Add money and make it happen. Work with us if you know things we don’t. But I should add: NewAssignment.Net doesn’t exist yet. I’m starting with the idea.

Highlighted by rlmrdl

Enterprise reporting goes pro-am. Assignments are open sourced. They begin online. Reporters working with smart users and blogging editors get the story the pack wouldn’t, couldn’t or didn’t. They raise the money too. Q and A explains. There's $10,000 to test it, courtesy of Craig Newmark.

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