I have said several times that a key fact giving rise to the idea of NewAssignment.Net is the falling costs for like-minded people to locate each other, share information and work together. Personal Democracy Forum recently published an interview that was all about that. It’s with Martin Kearns, executive director of Green Media Toolshed. He’s launched a new service called MediaVolunteer, which uses volunteers to construct and maintain an up-to-date national media database that non-profit groups can use to get their stories out. More than 20,000 people have contributed to the effort, which can take fewer than 15 minutes. Some key quotes from the interview:

At the core of www.mediavolunteer.org, we are looking at the scale of the internet as a platform for new organizing and new business models. The founders of eBay looked at the scale of the internet to reinvent the scope and reach of yard sales. Google’s founders looked out at the internet and realized that digital content needed to be organized. We are looking out to the edges of the keyboards (the people). We use the web to aggregate skills and intelligence into projects for the common good…

You don’t have to give your name or email. We will not ask for money or ask you to talk to an elected official that will likely blow you off. It would be a great service if your readers go to www.mediavolunteer.org and finish as many tasks as they can. I am asking. It will make a difference. It will only take a few minutes. You can go home and know you volunteered today.

These are lessons NewAssignment.Net will probably have to incorporate if it wants to succeed in using volunteers to do reporting projects.

I announced today at PressThink and the Guardian’s blog, Comment is Free, that Reuters is giving $100,000 to NewAssignment.Net. The money will underwrite the costs of hiring our first editor, who will start in early 2007. There’s reaction already from USA Today’s tech blogger, Angela Gunn.

It’s heartening to see one of the old-line news organizations put up some funding for this thing. Believe me, all but the most head-in-sand among us journalist types know our industry’s got to change. A lot of us are looking forward to it — it’s an exciting time to be telling the news and the possibilities are invigorating, if you’re not scared to death (and sometimes even if you are). But journalism, like too many other industries, is in many respects too hidebound to generate revolutionary change from within…

Which has something to do with this grant, I’m sure.

From Editor & Publisher’s coverage:

Reuters says it will have no editorial control over the site’s projects, and it will not hold right of first refusal for any of the stories that the site is covering.

We felt it was best to keep it clean.

Jason Boog at The Publishing Spot: “In the surprise marriage of the year, a big time newswire just hooked up with a band of citizen journalism upstarts….”

Here’s paidcontent.org’s coverage.

* Hey… new funder!

On September 7th, PressThink announced that NewAssignment.Net has received $10,000 in underwriting support from the Sunlight Foundation, matching the gift from Craig Newmark that got us started. Ellen Miller, the Executive Director of the Foundation, said at her blog on the Sunlight site: “I feel like Jay’s project is on the cusp of making some very big waves.”

We appreciate her support. We’re going to try small waves first. Like Newmark, Sunlight is underwriting the test project we plan to undertake in 2006. Meanwhile, we’ll be raising other money and building the site in stages, hoping for an early 2007 launch. I have been consulting with my advisers about how to go about the test project for which we now have $20,000. There’s nothing to announce yet, but I hope to have news on that soon.

* On the air: “Show us the Money”

Bob Garfield of NPR’s On the Media interviewed me about NewAssignment.Net. You can listen here. I think it turned out pretty well.

* Suggestion capture

Mark Glaser, who writes the Media Shift blog for pbs.org, asked his readers what they would like to see investigated by projects like NewAssignment.Net:

Whether it’s the Iraq War, the events of 9/11 or the Department of Homeland Security, government conduct (or misconduct) is what you’d like to see investigated most. I asked a very open-ended question to you last week, “What investigative report would you like to see done?” Your answers included many bread-and-butter issues such as health care, education and real estate. But the overriding issue was government conduct…

One of the suggestions Glaser got was from Russ Walker, an editor at Washingtonpost.com. Walker wrote:

There was much consternation about electronic voting in some quarters after the 2004 election. Were the results manipulated? Do the machines record votes properly? Can someone hack into the machines and change results later? What voting machinery you use depends on where you live, by and large. Local governments generally have the final say on what type of machine you will use. After the 2000 election mess, Congress approved billions to help states and local governments acquire updated machines. So here’s the project: Let’s build a database to identify what voting machines are in use in every precinct in the nation. That will be our baseline data set, from which we can attempt specific reporting projects after the 2006 midterm elections.

Glaser adds: “Perhaps Washingtonpost.com could help in such an effort?”

* Your Local Temple of Democracy: A Polling Places Project (Sketch)

I told Mark Glaser that “I could imagine a polling place project that tries to gather good information about every place Americans vote — who runs it, how it is equipped, who works there, how the votes are collected.” And I could certainly imagine partners.

Here’s a quick sketch of a possible “new” assignment. We’re not ready to do this for 2006, but it’s worth describing anyway.

The polling places project: Information about every place in the U.S. where Americans vote for Congress.

Meaning lots of information, collected by our increasingly able network, which contributes to an increasingly robust data base. Starts with the actual places where we vote, the street address, and builds outward to take in more and more from actual politics.

Who actually runs these places where our sovereignty is transacted? How are they staffed? What do they look like? (Photos from users.) What’s the scene likely to be when I go there to vote? What is the ballot going to look like when I go to vote?

What equipment will be used that day, how was it bought, how is it secured and controlled, who gets it there? What happens to our votes on election night, and what is the route they have to take to get counted? Precinct by precinct, the project can tell you, with increasing accuracy and plenitude.

Possible add-ons:

Securing the vote. Networked journalism about the state of the art in ballot protection, worldwide, compared to practices in the US, vs. protections in use at your polling place.

Capture the air war. Help us capture the ads that “land” on the heads of the people who vote in YOUR precinct so we have them online and anyone can examine them. You paid for these ads if you’re a contributor. Or someone else paid to reach you. Here you can examine the bombardment your district has experienced from the air in the race for Congress. (Political data from the receivers point of view. The ads that have landed on your head, where you live. Big networked journalism project just to get the stuff and have it available online.)

Dirty tricks in my district. Election news, “black arts” division. Networks of voters and users try to report on elusive scams we know happen in every election like “push polls,” phone jams, and other shadow tactics that (some) campaigns will have conducted for them at one or two removes. Of course the same networks would be in a position to find out about new or previously unreported tactics in the black arts division of the campaign.

The Boss files The way we figure it, if you’re in charge of my polling place I need to know a thing or two about you. Who controls these places on election day? NewAssignment.Net wants to talk to the people who operate the ballot boxes– not the machine, but the person. You can help. See what basic facts NewAssignment.Net has on the officials in charge in your precinct. If nothing, what are you waiting for? Volunteer to find out. We’ll show you how. Or… Go see the person-in-charge yourself. Do an interview and write about it as a concerned voter.

Day of the vote: Help us report to your friends and neighbors about what happens at the polling place. We’ll keep track of any irregularities and help you check them out yourself. It’s networked journalism done in real time on election day, users-know-more-than-we-do reporting gone live.

And like that….

* Reserve army

From the comments at the previous post comes this from Allan Macleese:

The key thing to me, a retired newspaperperson, is that there are, I would guess, hundreds of us our there that would dearly love to be turned loose on a good honest project. We were what could be called pros, and we are sitting here, idle, dinking about with this and that, and want to return to the action. So we used to be in the MSM, but don’t discount us, we will work for nothing, as many of us agreed, in esence,to do when we went to work on newspapers in the first instance.

He’s right. We definitely have to figure out how retired journalists like Macleese can be returned to action by NewAssignment.Net. In fact, there’s gotta be at least one retired journalist in every election district, right?

What is NewAssignment.Net?

New Assignment.Net is a non-profit site that tries to spark innovation in journalism by showing that open collaboration over the Internet among reporters, editors and large groups of users can produce high-quality work that serves the public interest, holds up under scrutiny, and builds trust.

A second aim is to figure out how to fund this work through a combination of online donations, micro-payments, traditional fundraising, syndication rights, sponsorships, advertising and any other method that does not compromise the site’s independence or reputation.

At New Assignment, pros and amateurs cooperate to produce work that neither could manage alone. The site uses open source methods to develop good assignments and help bring them to completion. It pays professional journalists to carry the project home and set high standards; they work closely with users who have something to contribute. The betting is that (some) people will donate to stories they can see are going to be great because the open methods allow for that glimpse ahead.

When will it debut?

Target date is April 1, 2007; that may shift. A proof-of-concept test is scheduled for the fall of 2006. Much depends on fundraising progress.

For whom is it intended?

New Assignment is for people who are interested in the news, online regularly and accustomed to informing themselves. It does stories the regular news media doesn’t do, can’t do, wouldn’t do, or already screwed up. And it allows for effective participation by users. The site gives out real assignments— paid gigs with a chance to practice the craft of reporting at a high level. Because they’re getting paid, the journalists who contract with New Assignment have the time—and obligation—to do things well. That means working with the users who gave rise to the assignment.

How can I find out more?

Go to PressThink, Jay Rosen’s blog. (Bio.) He’s the one who thought it up. New Assignment’s official home is New York University’s Department of Journalism, where Rosen is on the faculty. The initial description is Introducing NewAssignment.Net (July 24, 2006.) At that post and the others that followed, you will find links to reactions around the Net– and of course a comment thread.

See also these follow-up posts, Some Problems with New Assignment.Net (July 28) and How Realistic is New Assignment.Net?(Aug. 11. ) Also Exploding By-Lines: Update on NewAssignment.Net (Aug. 27) and Editing Horizontally: Thanks to Reuters, NewAssignment.Net Can Hire Someone (Sep. 20.)

And for further background check into my interview with readers of Slashdot (Oct. 3) along with The People Formerly Known as the Audience (June 27) and Users-Know-More-than-We-Do Journalism (June 22).

How can I contribute?

You can comment here, and soon you will be able to donate in modest amounts online. NewAssignment.Net will be running it’s first test in Fall 2006, so watch this site for announcements. Donors interested in contributing $1,000 or more should contact Jay Rosen via e-mail. If you’re a blogger, you can of course write a post about it. That’s a contribution

What are they saying?

Lots. Here’s the Technorati search. And here are some of the initial reactions:

The Economist: “New online models will spring up as papers retreat. One non-profit group, NewAssignment.Net, plans to combine the work of amateurs and professionals to produce investigative stories on the internet.”

Craig Newmark of Craigslist.org at his blog. “Journalism’s evolving, and we’re seeing the convergence of professional journalism and citizen journalism.

Staci Kramer at paidContent.org. “A good example of how people at all levels are grappling with ways to turn the potential of community-based journalism into reality.”

Kevin Maney of USA Today. “A terrific experiment that should teach us something about where journalism is heading.”

Stephen Spruiell at National Review’s Media Blog: “If there’s a way to improve the press that’s better than the current tug-of-war over ‘objectivity,’ we could be seeing its beginnings.”

Nicholas Lemann in the New Yorker: “The key to the idea, in Rosen’s mind, is to give ‘people formerly known as the audience’ the assigning power previously reserved for editors.”

Mark Glaser at the PBS blog Media Shift. “Perhaps there’s a way to harness the power of the easy, powerful connections we can make online to do a new kind of investigative journalism.”

Amy Gahran at Poynter’s E-Media blog. “It’s intriguing.”

Scott Rosenberg of Salon. “Old-fashioned editorial processes mesh with newfangled feedback loops and reputation systems to produce something new and unique.”

Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine. “NewAssignment will not replace the work of professional news organizations. It will complement them, attacking the stories that are not being covered.”

Andrew Nachison at Morph. “Certainly the open process will be a novel flip of the traditional approach to journalism, which itself works in some cases and not in others.”

Aaron Barlow at Daily Kos: “We citizen journalists will be watching with interest.”

Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News. “Let’s face it, the current system of investigative reporting has broken down.”

Gal Beckerman at CJR Daily. “Let’s give it a whirl.”