New Haven Independent

The Big Story here isn’t the story itself — but the story behind the story.

The man behind the story is Jay Rosen. He’s pictured in these video clips.

Rosen, an NYU journalism professor, is a leading voice of the new citizen-involved, grassroots web-based news media (a sprawling worldwide experiment of which this local website is a part). Rosen is on leave from his teaching job to jump-start his latest venture, newassignment.net. The venture launched in March. In the clip at the top of this story (click on the play arrow to watch it), Rosen describes how Reuters gave him $100,000 to start the venture as a way to explore future models of reporting.

Rosen has hired professional journalists to work with everyday citizens to pursue news stories as a “crowd,” linking up through the Internet. Rosen sees this as one model of a new approach to news-gathering, combining the talents of pros with citizens who live the subjects of the stories or have special expertise to tell a more nuanced, balanced, in-depth tale than the conventional media delivers.

Rosen described the venture and its first story in a visit this past week to a “future of journalism” class at the Yale School of Management. (Disclosure: I invited Rosen there. Steve Taylor and I teach the course.)

Each story undertaken by newassignment.net will take months. Readers/ citizen participants help decide what topics to cover, and how. Then they sign up to pursue parts of the story. Rosen’s editors and reporters sift through the contributions, fact check, and prepare an in-depth final story.

The newassignment.net’s first story will cover a phenomenon that includes the site itself: “crowdsourcing,” in which large groups of people who may not have otherwise ever met each other share knowledge on a grand scale. In this video clip (click on the play arrow), Rosen describes how crowdsourcing has transformed everything from knitting to encylopedias to computer software.

Here’s amazing news: more than 800 contributors/ “citizen journalists” have already signed up to work on the story. Click here to see who they are. Will all those people be able to produce a single body of work… on deadline? We’ll find out in mid-May.

Wired contributed $50,000 to pay for an editor for the first story. It will publish some of the work on its own website and its magazine. If Rosen’s not-for-profit experiment persists, much of its crowd-sourced work will probably be undertaken in conjunction with existing major news outlets.

In the process, Rosen is hoping to help return the Web to its roots. Click on the play arrow here to watch him discuss how and why the Web was developed, beginning with the work of Tim Berners-Lee. The web started out as a collaborative medium, enabling people far and wide to share information and ideas. Then it gravitated toward becoming just another corporate-dominated mass medium, with one company sending out its message to many consumers. If newassignment.net and its many cousins succeed, perhaps that democratic vision can be reclaimed — and the promise of the Internet fulfilled.