Wired News and Assignment.net together have launched Assignment Zero, the site that endeavors to bring together the professional and amateur talent. They are calling the undertaking ‘pro am journalism’ as it is a mix of some formatting and freestyling with some things decided by editors while the others left to the participants. The reuters funded non-profit project Assignment Zero is trying to develop the practice of crowdsourced journalism by investigating the art of crowdsourcing itself as they want people to generate the content online. Assignment Zero has also teamed up with Newsvine, who will get the assignments done from the contributers in their own preferred style. All the content on the site will be licensed through the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License. Evan Hansen, Editor in Chief, Wired News commented:
Essentially, we’re building a software platform for journalism 2.0 - open source and extensible - which we believe will bring new dimensions of creativity to news gathering.
Well, I really welcome the bold attempt from Wired but I am a bit cynical about the success of the venture. Let’s take a deeper look.
Wired has coined the term ‘crowdsourcing‘ with the project. They say:
We’re going to investigate the growth and spread of crowdsourcing, which overlaps with something called peer production. (Yochai Benkler’s complete term is “commons-based peer production.”) This basically means people making valuable stuff by cooperating online, mainly because they want to and sometimes because they’re paid to assist.
Well, crowdsourcing has its own advantages as it cut down the total costs as innovative ideas can be explored at relatively little cost. In the case of Assignment Zero, there seems to be a paid model as their words reveal and moreover, crowdsourcing mated with peer production seems to be great idea.
We’re trying to figure something out here. 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?
It is obviously a better idea to have citizen journalists from around the world reporting the news online instead of appointing a reporter in every city of the world.
But, the idea of crowdsourcing won’t be able to generate that much quality in the end. In addition, it won’t be that easy to manage crowdsourcing at such a large scale (at small scale with only a few contributors, it’s already dead), might face problems in luring regular contributors for the open newsroom.
Read these two contradictory lines from the press release.
... because they want to and sometimes because they’re paid to assist.
... Can large groups of widely scattered people, working together voluntarily on the net
Assignment Zero is another WikiNews attempt:
We can surely quote the examples of WikiNews here. Can’t we? The very first thing I suppose some of you might ask that why are we taking Assignment Zero as WikiNews? Why are we not comparing it to Wikipedia as it will work like Wikipedia where readers will contribute the same way they do at Wikipedia?
Well, Wikipedia differs from WikiNews in its own way. A news site has to report the news and you better know that no one likes to read the stale news. If you wish to add your views to the online encyclopedia, the Wikipedia, you can take your time and post the content today, tomorrow or day after tomorrow but this won’t work at any cost if you are reporting news. The news get obsolete within few hours so you need to be that nippy to make the news available to the readers at the right time.
WikiNews suffered from the very same problem and it will be safe to say that WikiNews is a full failure at the moment. Even if Assignment Zero manages to get the top stories of the particular day, it won’t be so easy for them to get mediocre news (they have their own importance) at the right time.
So, I doubt Assignment Zero might meet the same fate as WikiNews.
What are others saying?
Mediavidea: It is too early to say. However, Jimmy Wales’ idea of open source magazines at Wikia is an idea Wired might have looked into.
Mashable: Wired coined the term ‘crowdsourcing’, so if they can’t make it work, no one can. I’m skeptical about whether any of this stuff can be successful due to the headaches of managing large teams - Wikipedia broke out, but WikiNews didn’t.
Crowdsourcing: I think it’s going to reveal some important aspects of crowdsourcing, from its potential to liberate creative potential to its inherent danger to exploit the collective.
901am: Wired has an open call for cool designs. News to me, and why ‘cool’ designs and not functional designs? Why pay journalists when we can get the same stuff from people for free.
It goes on and on, towards the end it sounds like a take on WikiNews, which as anyone knows who has visited the site lately has been a complete failure.
Achenblog: It’s a pro-am thing. It’s a bit like Wikipedia-meets-Woodward-and-Bernstein. Rosen calls it “distributed journalism.’
What is the biggest problem with the current online news sites?
With the motto of ‘Every Citizen is a Reporter’, South Korea-based web site OhmyNews has established itself as a pioneer in the field of ‘Citizen Journalism’. It celebrated its seventh birthday last month only.
The very big and noticeable difference between the two is that while OhMyNews pays professional writers, Assignment Zero is talking about widely scattered people making voluntary contribution. The problem that I think with OhMyNews is that though they are delivering good quality, there are very less stories coming per person. In the same way, Assignment Zero might face the same problems. In case of Newsvine, there is an automated process of outsourcing the news from AP. Although they are able to cover most of the recent news, the overall impact of the news is not that strong enough at the end of the day as most of the top news are outsourced from a news organization rather than from the individuals.
My take:
Well, the biggest problem with the entire existing news site is that they are not able to make their site an exact newspaper. Most of the times, big media outlets are not so flexible. They prefer bloggers instead of blogs. And, that is what I think Assignment Zero is trying to do.
Well, the bold attempt by Wired is indeed appreciable but the fate of Assignment Zero will depend on the way they will execute the things. That will be interesting to see. Anyway, I wish the project all the very best for a bright future.
