Assignment Zero, Day Six: Help Wanted Section
I'm looking for amateur-friendly pros who can work with the people who have joined up with us. Five days ago we launched AZ. We now have 450 contributors--each with a profile and a blog--slowly filtering into the site. What do we do now? they're asking. That's where you come in...

“We’re going to take one big, moving story—the spread of crowdsourcing and peer production methods across wired society—and with your active assistance break it down into reportable parts,” I wrote at Wired.com last week. “Some of these parts we already have. More of them is what we need. Then we’re going to develop those parts — in the open, at the site — into pieces we can formally assign to contributors.”

It is a hybrid form of journalism—pro-am, I call it—now playing at our site. So far there’s been strong response from the am side. We had 450 volunteers by Sunday. We will soon have 500 people who have joined Assignment Zero and our partnership with Wired. That means they’re willing to contribute to the nuanced telling of one sprawling (but manageable) trend story.

In this we’re ahead of where I thought we would be.

And so today I need to recruit more pros who can work with the Assignment Zero team, and with contributors like Michael Ho, who joined up over the weekend. He says he works in IT but had an interest in journalism back in college. “I am a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area and would be able to assist you with background or interviews throughout the area.”

Exactly. Put a pin in the map. Now that we have Michael Ho interested and able to assist, we need to get him something to do that advances the story. (A newsroom phrase I like.) But that’s not enough. The small piece he’s working on has to clearly connect with the larger narrative. The beta site we launched last week has most of the architecture required for breaking a big story into parts so contributors can improve those parts. (The developers were ChapterThree, specialists in open practice.)

But the site needs a lot of work. It also generates a lot of work when people start using it. Lauren Sandler, the editor of Assignment Zero, can’t easily guide 500-plus contributors to their best contributions and 75-plus pieces to completion. She needs help. I’m betting there are curious professionals out there who would like to contribute on a voluntary basis. I mean experienced and talented journalists who…

* are first of all comfortable on the web (though you need not be a webbie, or use RSS)
* understand what we’re trying to do with Assignment Zero (go here, here and here if you don’t…also here)
* think that with the right mix of openness and controls pro-am reporting projects can work
* bring particular editorial skills and useful experience to the project
* have spare cycles, hours per week, to take on some of the work generated by the participation we are starting to get.

HELP WANTED

1. Editors who can provide oversight of topic pages as they evolve from suggestions into stories in our open newsroom. An example of a topic is No. 669 on Crowd Sourced Film. Right now the page is quite undeveloped. For Assignment Zero to work these topic home pages have to be way more effective.

The idea is that some in our swarm of 500 will want to contribute what they know about crowd-sourced film (as I did here.) Meanwhile, if those who love indie film gravitate toward their interests, they’ll find topic 669. We have to be ready with our Things to Do list when they land on this page— which we will re-tool and develop as soon as we can. But mostly we need someone to care for it, and work with contributors who want to add to a story percolating there.

2. Reporters who can work on the right side of a page like this one. It’s 583, Open Source Religion. Is there anything to it? This is typical of what the ams can help us find out. See that list on the right? (“Sketch out the big picture.”) Right now it’s pretty weak. But a reporter with experience covering religion could make it a whole lot better. We need people like that.

3. Web-savvy journalists with multiple skills who can learn our system quickly and solve problems, put out fires and handle discrete tasks for editor Lauren Sandler, who is learning as she goes. (Fast.) You simply report for duty and she assigns you to work needed now. A lot of it will be communicating with “am” contributors so they know what to do and can do it. Here we need pros who are flexible and play well with others. Willing to be sent where needed. You have to be able to work independently, and report in with updates.

4. You don’t have to be a journalist for this category. Amanda Michel is not a journalist. She’s Director of Participation for NewAssignment.Net. Her background is in online organizing. As DP for Assignment Zero, it’s her job to solve the problems people have when they try to contribute. She’s supposed to lower the barriers to entry for the people we want to attract, and actively recruit new people, while equipping the ones we have with better and better tools. (As well as voice.)

Big job. Impossible without help, especially when you have a team of 500-plus people. What kind of help? Super organized people with experience on the net. People who are good at meshing with volunteers. People who have worked with teams to collaborate via the web, and who know how to keep track of complex projects with many players. Journalism by the many, edited by a few, requires great efficiency and strong systems. Help us out if you understand what’s required.

Do I have your interest?

EDITORS: Volunteer your editorial eye and oversee, O-fficially, one or more topic pages for us. Just send me an email telling me who you are, and where your interests lie. Reality check: seven hours a week to devote to it should be enough for one page (… ten is better.) We’d like to know what you can donate per week for the next 5, 6, 7 weeks. And a bit about why you’re interested in making a contribution like that. Retired from the game with strong editing experience and good Web literacy? We’re interested.

REPORTERS: Donate to Assignment Zero your reporting skills and sense. You’ll be helping to scope out a story and break it down, which means right-sizing Things to Do for our crowd of contributors (while taking their suggestions) and sorting them into two kinds…

* “Open” tasks. Things anyone passing by can do, a kind of participation we know about from Wikipedia. An example would be collecting background links. Anyone can do it.

* Assignments with authors. When someone connected with the project is asked to complete something, and we specifically note who that is, it’s an assignment with an “author.”

We want you to help develop bite-sized reporting tasks in both categories for distribution through the Assignment Desk. Do some of the reporting yourself, and show contributors your tricks. Comment on what they are doing. Work with them backstage. We anticipate that volunteers will want to learn from you, as this is one of the benefits of the pro-am style.

For experienced reporters thinking about raising a hand, five to seven hours a week would be enough of a donation for you to materially help us, and get something out of it. Send me an email telling me who you are, what you have done, and why you want to join up with Assignment Zero. My best guess is it will be frustrating (because we’re at such a crude stage) and fun (because we’re at such an early stage.)

WEB JOURNALISTS with flexible skills. Ready for some serious real time philanthropy? Donate free hours to editor Lauren Sandler, and let her deploy you where you are urgently needed. Just write me an email telling me who you are, and why this sounds like something you’d want to do.

SUPERBLY ORGANIZED PEOPLE with Net sense and common sense. Volunteer to work with Amanda Michel, director of participation, as she figures out the social architecture we need to do this assignment. Its not obvious how you organize a big meet-up in editorial space with a moving story, an open platform and hundreds of amateur contributors. Can you assist? Send me an email and explain all. I will forward it on to Amanda.

COMPANIES, PROFESSIONAL NEWS ORGANIZATIONS. Give us one of your staffers, a journalist who is most interested in Assignment Zero. Let him or her work for us for a while, and we’ll return to you a journalist more educated in the possibilities in many-to-many reporting and pro-am investigation. Deal? Write me with an idea.

DRUPAL DEVELOPERS with a feel for what we’re up to. Help! Work with me and, possibly, Chapterthree as we try to make this site rock. There’s a lot to do. (And check out the critique from Andrew Nachison: “I’ve had this feeling before with sites built on Drupal - a powerful open-source publishing system that seems to inspire complicated sites.”)

FINALLY, FUNDERS: We need $1.5 million over two years; we’ve raised about $450,000 of that. Take a look at who’s supporting us— MacArthur Foundation, Craig Newmark, Reuters among them. Do contact me if you can assist.

Posted by Jay Rosen at March 19, 2007 7:06 AM Print

This has been floating around the Internet for sometime now. I don't believe this is a real paper.

It's true that crowdsourcing can bring new life to journalism: through replacement, with pro-am collaborations replacing coverage lost to newsroom cuts; through exploitation*, with newspaper execs "harvesting" the wisdom of their community; or through bypass, with the "people formerly known as the audience" banding together to tackle investigations that -- for varied reasons** -- the mainstream press is less eager to address.

The wacky fallout continues.