I’ve been through Jay Rosen’s first of two parts on NewAssignment.Net twice now (note: Part two is promised for Thursday) and through the comments, too. Some initial reactions (I’m leaving the concerns I have for a later post, after publication of and rumination on part two):
1. I am awe-struck by the elegance of Jay’s proposal.
2. It will work.
3. It is a significant piece of the needed rethinking of media, but not a large piece.
4. Some of the enthusiastic responses in the comments (where do I send a donation, I have story ideas to start this with, etc.) prove — again — the thirst for new ways of doing journalism.
5. One of the reasons I like what Jay is proposing is that it feeds into a long-term suspicion of mine that a big part of the future of journalism lies in the concept of “trusted editors.”
Expanding on those a little bit:
1. I am awe-struck by the elegance of Jay’s proposal.
I am using a scientific definition of elegance here: pleasingly ingenuous and simple (Source: Oxford American widget). To remix David Weinberger, we have some large pieces tightly joined in aid of producing good journalism. All the terms that have become buzzwords — transparency, wisdom of the crowds, smarter readers, etc — are made practical and come together with hard-nosed (they will have to be) editors and reporters willing to work in new ways.
I like that this is not the wheel reinvented. The parts of this are at play out there already in ways large and small (eg: reader contribution/ranking at Now Public; reader-driven reporting at AskQuestions.org). Some reporters are increasingly relying on input from readers to define and shape stories.
The elegance of Jay’s proposal is in bringing together ideas from a number of sources and fitting them together into a solid, workable whole.
2. It will work.
It will work because the addition of editors to the process, and making them largely responsible for the financial and readership success of the venture, brings discipline to the process. Crowds aren’t wise, but their aggregate actions can be — given guidance.
(An aside: Constant comparisons of reader-driven initiatives to Digg drive me nuts: I find it one of the least useful sources for technology information. Too much noise; enough signal. I cancelled my RSS subscription to Digg when it seemed that the prime consideration for an article rising up the charts was the number of exclamation points in the title.)
It will work because there are enough interested readers willing to put out money for good journalism. Here in Vancouver, The Tyee, an online-only alternative to the big dailies, successfully raised more than $30,000 from readers for an investigative and solutions-oriented reporting fund. We gave them the money because we trust them to deliver.
It will work because we have plenty of evidence that there are journalists (and journalists-to-be) willing to put in the hard work needed to extend journalism into new areas.
And it will work because there is a small but potent group of people who are both audience and engaged — in the world around them, in the process of informing themselves, in their belief in journalism as necessary, in the desire to do what they can to make things better.
3. It is a significant piece of the needed rethinking of media, but not a large piece.
NewAssignment.net is a piece of an emerging new mediascape that’s not based on a handful of models (the newspaper, the radio station, the internet portal) but on many models: solojos such as Kevin Sites, aggressively remade media (Spokane Spokesman-Review, etc.), independent news voices (Baristanet, etc.), hyperlocal neighbourhood sites (kitsilano.ca), and on and on and on.
NewsAssignment.net is not the model for remaking journalism, although it stands to become a significant part of that new mediascape without the need to become The New York Times of “new media.” It also stands to become significant in showing that a mixed model (distributed journalism, networked journalism, whatever you want to call it) makes sense, works and delivers quality journalism. It stands to become significant as that success is ripped, mixed and burned by others, including mainstream media, and extended to areas of journalism other than unreported or underreported stories.
When I write that this is not a large piece I mean no disrespect. There are many, many examples of small but significant things happening in journalism. Jay cites one: The Center for Public Integrity. Lives in Focus is another.
4. Some of the enthusiastic responses in the comments (where do I send a donation, I have story ideas to start this with, etc.) prove — again — the thirst for new ways of doing journalism.
Not much need to expand on that. Anyone who hasn’t seen that thirst, from both readers and (some) journalists, hasn’t been paying attention.
5. One of the reasons I like what Jay is proposing is that it feeds into a long-term suspicion of mine that a big part of the future of journalism lies in the concept of “trusted editors.”
Again, not much to expand on here, other than this observation: Jay’s proposal explicitly makes the editors agents for/partners with “the people formerly known as the audience” as well as with the reporters. That’s revolutionary.
TAGS: JOURNALISM, RETHINKING MEDIA, NEWASSIGNMENT.NET, JAY ROSEN
