All the World’s a Story

ALL THE WORLD'S A STORY
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: David Carr]
A new experiment wants to broaden the network of journalism's sources to include readers and their sources. Assignment Zero (zero.newassignment.net/), a collaboration between Wired magazine and NewAssignment.Net, the experimental journalism site established by Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University, intends to use not only the wisdom of the crowd, but their combined reporting efforts -- an approach that has come to be called “crowdsourcing.” The idea is to apply to journalism the same open-source model of Web-enabled collaboration that produced the operating system Linux, the Web browser Mozilla and the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. “Can large groups of widely scattered people, working together voluntarily on the net, report on something happening in their world right now, and by dividing the work wisely tell the story more completely, while hitting high standards in truth, accuracy and free expression?” Professor Rosen asked last week on Wired.com. That may not seem like much of a revolution at a time when millions are staring at user-generated video on YouTube, but journalism is generally left in the hands of professionals.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/19/business/media/19carr.html
(requires registration)