and thanks David–”the hardest working young man in journalism”–Cohn for posting the link to my participation post :-)

Actually it was the reverse. We started with topical departments and set assignments with editors.

That was when it wasn’t working. There are a couple reasons for this. One, I think, was that we were dictating where the story would go.

Then we constricted and basically said: Okay — no set departments — let’s just do interviews. It was a set task — but the interview could be with anyone (assuming a contributor could make a case that the interview was related to crowdsourcing).

We made a list of people we wanted to interview, but some of the best ones were suggested by contributors (usually the person who suggested the interview followed up by actually doing it too).

But there were no set beats during the interview process. Everything scaled on the assumption that we were just trying to get a specific task done.

The feature stories that we did were a result of a more MSM newsroom organization.

In one sense, this shouldn’t be a surprise for anyone. Say what you will about the merits of MSM, its had several hundred years to evolve to its current state.

It seems that the imposition of structure is an all or nothing proposition: either there’s no agenda, or there’s a comprehensive structure set-up to achieve an agenda. Agenda without structure flatlines. Structure without a consistent agenda results in push-back - as was the case with the Digg HD-DVD key fiasco.

Interesting times!

I wrote a little about my experinece at AZ on my blog , but Tish Grier did a much more thorough job:

http://spap-oop.blogspot.com/2007/07/assignment-zero-post-mortem.html

Auspicious timing. Er.