E-Media Tidbits

Rachel Sklar NewAssignment.net founder Jay Rosen.

Today, NYU professor Jay Rosen announced that Reuters has given $100,000 to fund the NewAssignment.net project that will combine distributed citizen journalism with professional editing to produce original enterprise reporting. (Full disclosure: I'm an unpaid advisor to this project.)

Rosen wrote, "NewAssignment.Net is a not a plan for a company; in fact, it's closer to a charity, an editorial engine anchored in civil society itself, rather than the media industry or journalism profession. ...[It] can be on friendly terms with Big Media, which it is is not trying to destroy or supplant."

And: "The money from Reuters will underwrite the costs of hiring our first editor, who will start in early 2007. ...It's going to be a fun job. ...The idea is to draw "smart crowds" -- a group of people configured to share intelligence -- into collaboration at NewAssignment.Net and get stories done that way that aren't getting done now. By pooling their intelligence and dividing up the work, a network of volunteer users can find things out that the larger public needs to know. I think that's most likely to happen in collaboration with editors and reporters who are paid to meet deadines, and to set a consistent standard."

Earlier, this project attracted $10,000 each from Craig Newmark and the Sunlight Foundation, but the Reuters funding represents a huge jump in resources -- and thus in capabilities for the project. I expect the stories NewAssignment.net pursues will be pretty ambitious, and now there are serious resources to back up that ambition.

I also expect that by giving this project a decent start, Reuters will probably learn a lot about what might be possible from trying a different approach to journalism. I think, however it turns out, the entire field of journalism and the news business organization will benefit from this experiment.