The first project of Jay Rosen & co’s New Assignment has launched: Assignment Zero invites me and you to help write bits and pieces which will then form part of a “package” to be published in a couple of months time – and the issue, the story is crowdsourcing. The project is a collaboration with Wired, and Rosen introduces it as follows:

We’re trying to create a pro-am, open-platform reporting tool that we can improve and modify later, for use in bigger, more sprawling and difficult stories down the road. Maybe about the environment. Or the schools. Or — who knows? — the war.

I like the approach, for several reasons: The time is right to move beyond the “dear-user/reader-here-you-can-write-whatever-you-want”-phase. Giving people the opportunity to participate was and is fantastic. The ability to blog, comment on news stories, debate in forums etc opens up journalism. But I think that to work, citizen journalism – a journalism that is produced in part or completely by people outside the established media – also requires editorial leadership (I’ve made this point in the Norwegian context recently: Borgerjournalister trenger ledelse). Leadership here doesn’t have to mean “rib people of their new freedom”. Instead, it can and should mean “respect people’s contributions enough to make a real effort yourself” – in requesting, discussing and, finally, editing the contributions. This brings me to another aspect that I liked:

We’ll edit what comes in and with the crowd’s help verify it to the best of our ability.

Without more explanation, Rosen makes it clear that a traditional editing process will be part of the whole production of this “package”. Excellent, as long as contributors also get the chance to review and comment on a draft before the whole thing is finalized. “Forget editing”, that is a myth underlying much of what’s being said about participatory media. Here that myth is implicitly rejected.

There are dangers, as well. The project might not work. Maybe too few people will be willing to donate enough time and effort. But assuming that the project gets off the ground, there’s another danger. Parts of the final product might appear in Wired. But even then, the citizen contributors won’t get paid (as far as I understand it), they will “only” get a byline. This might raise the familiar discussion of commercial media exploiting the work of volunteers.

Successful open source programming and projects like Wikipedia work because there are other incentives than money. It could definitely be that the incentives involved in Assignment Zero will be attractive enough for the project to succeed. Exciting times ahead.