Thursday, March 22, 2007

"Crowdsourcing" - Citizen Journalism

From a story in the New York Times on March 19, 2007 an online news operation is now set up in "the same open-source model of Web-enabled collaboration that produced the operating system Linux, the Web browser Mozilla and the online encyclopedia Wikipedia."

The reporters this operation is using are, according to Jay Rosen, the NYU professor who began it, just about anyone who wants to. "Can large groups of widely scattered people, working together voluntarily on the net, report on something happening in their world right now and by dividing the work wisely tell the story more completely, while hitting high standards in truth, accuracy and free expression?” Professor Rosen asked last week on Wired.com.

You can register with the New York Times to read the story about this new form of bottom-up truthtelling, and then check out the site itself for the first assignments. Perhaps you may wish to become one of the reporters at http://zero.newassignment.net/.

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