Citizen Journalism

"One day, stories with a thousand people on the masterhead might become routine"

Is open-source pro-am journalism a possible future for reporting? The mission of Assignment Zero is to find out! Assignment Zero is taking the story of: "the spread of crowdsourcing/peer production accross wired society" and seeing if they can report on this in an open-source manor by distributing duties to a variety of people online. Will people find the motivation to do this without pay, because this is going to be a mostly volunteer project...

I think this idea is very smart, and will propbably be a huge trend in the future. Blogs, personal websites, social networking sites, and just general posting on websites has become more and more popular as more people learn about the internet, and I think it is just going to take the good idea such as Assignment Zero make something with Citizen Journalism to work. Imagine people in the Middle East and cities like New York City collaborating online to publish an article about the war. If it was put together well, why wouldn't someone want to read that article over a one-sided article about the same subject off a different site.

I guess that brings about the subject of reputation. However with a reputable magazine like Wired helping out Assignment Zero, I see this project really working. It is going to take some good promoting though. I am sure there are lots of people who would be willing to help out on these projects if they hear about it. You just need to find the right people. People who write for free....blog people.

Quotes from Wired's "Citizen Journalism Wants You" by Jay Rosen 3.14.07

Your Crew

(http://ozguru.mu.nu/Photos/teamwork.gif)
I loved the idea from "How to pick your million dollar crew" of the 4/5 person team. The descriptions were great. Leader, Brain, Anchor, Soldier, and the Freelancers. It was a very good blog, but I would argue that there are other ways to get a mission done than compare it to robbing a bank and hiring freelancers. Not everything is like "The Bank Job" or "The Italian Job" although those are some of my favorite movies.

Sometimes you will have one person with an idea who just tackles it in his head and executes it and is successful. Other times you will have someone who steals an idea, like the Brain and will just get it done. Sometimes there are numerous teams who have to coordinate and sometimes there are none. I know when we did the puzzle project in class the other day I was not in the mood to do puzzles, and some people on my team picked up the extra slack. I think there are a lot of variables in teams which need to be accounted for... Motivation, or areas of expertise to name some.
I love comparing things to sports so I do it a lot, but you can't compare all teams to sports either.

I can't help but mention Pinky and the Brain, a show I use to watch on Cartoon Network. The Brain always has the ideas and Pinky who I guess is the Soldier is a really horrible Soldier and always screws things up... pretty funny...

LinkedIn is in my opinion is a very useful social networking tool. It is very professional and easy to use. When I first became a member last year, it was mainly used for employers and employees to connect and now, students at college also have the option to join. I personally hope however that they do not expand the network anymore than that.

One thing I really like about LinkedIn is that it is very professional. On Facebook, anyone can join and be members of numerous networks (a school, or a hometown to name a few) or there is always the option of “no network”. Hopefully, to become a member of LinkedIn you will have to join one of their networks (a school or a university/college), because I don’t think giving the option for anyone to join would be helpful, and I am worried that the value if LinkedIn will decrease.

When anyone has the option to join these networks, advertising seems to kick in more. I hope that the next time I log into LinkedIn I don’t have a poke or a party invitation waiting for me.


*Here is a picture of a search on LinkedIn where you can see users and some limited information about them. This information was taken from the website www.askdavetaylor.com in an article teaching the basics of LinkedIn called "How do I use LinkedIn to find a job?"