NewAssignment.net creator and journalism prof Jay Rosen’s latest venture just went live: Beatblogging is an attempt to improve the coverage of specific news areas or “beats” by using social-media such as blogs and wikis. In effect, Jay and his team — led by the indefatigable David “DigiDave” Cohn — want to help beat reporters use “crowdsourcing” methods (like Jay’s project with Huffington Post, the political-reporting effort OffTheBus.com) to draw knowledge from various sources.

The list of 13 participants is at Jay’s site, PressThink, and also at the MediaShift Idea Lab site that is part of PBS. It includes Wired digital-music writer Eliot Van Buskirk, a science reporter at the Houston Chronicle, a public-school reporter at the Dallas Morning News, a basketball writer at ESPN.com and a technology reporter at the Seattle Times. The San Jose Mercury News has some thoughts about why it’s taking part.

I think Jay’s idea is brilliant, and it will be fascinating to see how it develops. I wish there were some Canadian newspaper reporters taking part.

I’ve been meaning to mention this before, but Jay Rosen, the brains behind NewAssignment.net and its various spinoffs — including OffTheBus, the citizen-journalism political reporting venture with Huffington Post — has a new project that he told me about when we met for a drink while he was in Toronto for the Online News Association conference (he told the conference about it too).

In a nutshell, Jay’s idea is this: take social-media tools such as blogs, wikis, social-bookmarking and so on, and use them to help “beat” reporters at newspapers improve their coverage of that beat, by allowing sources to contribute their knowledge in a variety of ways. As Jay describes it:

“Maybe a beat reporter could do a way better job if there was a “live” social network connected to the beat, made up of people who know the territory the beat covers, and want the reporting on that beat to be better.”

I think this is a great idea, and I hope Jay finds enough reporters (and newspapers) who want to participate. He says he has 7 or 8 of the 12 he is looking for already signed up. As I said to Jay when we met in Toronto, my only reservations are that some sources may not want it known that they are sources, and reporters may not be comfortable opening up about how they do what they do.

That said, I think it will be a fascinating experiment in Journalism 2.0, just as Assignment Zero (the joint research project between NewAssignment and Wired magazine) was.

I’ve been meaning to get to this for days now, but I wanted to post about Jay Rosen’s lessons from Assignment Zero, the “crowdsourcing” journalism experiment he put together between his NewAssignment project and Wired magazine, with help from a team of people that included Dave “Digi-Dave” Cohn and Tish Grier. On a related note, Dave has also been working with Jeff Jarvis on the Networked Journalism mini-conference Jeff just finished putting together, and has a list of interviews with people who are involved in what might broadly be called social media in one way or another.

Among other things, Jeff admits that the trend story that Assignment Zero chose to focus its efforts on — the impact of crowdsourcing itself, and other “open source” approaches to media — was a little too “meta” and a little too big and subjective for the first project. And he quotes from Derek Powazek’s advice in his review of Assignment Zero lessons (which is here):

“Start with clear, simple tasks. This isn’t because the crowd can’t handle complicated ones – they can – it’s because they haven’t decided if it’s worth doing them for you yet.

People won’t do what you say because you just told them to. You have to inspire them to want to participate.”

Many of the issues that came up with Assignment Zero (and Wired writer Jeff Howe has his own take on the lessons here and here) didn’t have to do with the idea or even the execution so much as the co-ordination of volunteers and contributors. Finding out what people’s motivations are, how much they can do, what they want to do, and then dividing the work up amongst them is hard, Jay says.

“Dividing up the work into tasks people can and will do is among the trickiest decisions the project will have. Expectations have to be extremely clear or a crowd will generate a limitless number of honest misunderstandings.”

One of the potential solutions Jay talks about is having what the open-source movement calls “super-contributors,” whose job it is to help find and co-ordinate other contributors. While he says Assignment Zero did not “crack this case,” Jay told me that he thinks Off The Bus — the networked journalism project that NewAssignment is working on with The Huffington Post — is closer to a solution.

Assignment Zero and Off The Bus co-ordinator Amanda Michel writes a bit about participation levels here, and gives an example of the work Off The Bus is doing with “citizen journalists” here.

Update (Aug. 3):

Leonard Brody of NowPublic posted a response to Jay’s note on Facebook saying: “Jay, thanks so much for this…great analysis. We really would love to have you as an advisor to the company. Interested?”

Original post:

Given that New York University professor Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.net is at the forefront of “citizen journalism” (or “crowdsourced” journalism or “networked” journalism, or whatever you choose to call it) it’s probably not surprising that he has some thoughts on the recent announcement by Vancouver-based NowPublic that it has landed $10.6-million in venture funding and is also expanding its relationship with the Associated Press — all of which I wrote about in a Globe and Mail news story and a blog post.

Jay recently wrote a Facebook note about the deal, in which he said that he sees great potential for NowPublic to evolve from what it is now into a true “networked journalism” site with full-fledged news reports as well as photos and videos — but he says that doing so will likely take more co-ordination and editorial oversight than the site is currently doing (at the moment NowPublic has no staff editors, although it does have former CTV reporter Mark Schneider overseeing things).

Jay has been through his own experiment with networked journalism in the Assignment Zero project, which was a co-venture with Wired magazine writer Jeff “Crowdsourcing” Howe and a host of others (more on that in this post by Jeff and a follow-up here) and is currently engaged in another with HuffingtonPost.com — a political reporting effort called OffTheBus. Jay did an interview about Assignment Zero here.

After I read his note, I asked Jay whether I could excerpt some of his thoughts here (for you non-Facebook types), and he graciously agreed.

One of the points he made is that NowPublic has so far been “most effective as a spot photo site.” Its distribution deal with AP, he says:

“Was mostly for the network of photographers who can get to sudden news events (like the proverbial plane crash in a cornfield) more quickly than AP could dispatch one of its pros…

This is the continued unfolding of a sudden realization that struck with the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004, and again with the London train bombings, two events that put “user generated content” on the map of the world’s news.”

Jay quotes a comment from Reuters CEO Tom Glocer about the tsunami, in which he said that the news agency had 2,300 journalists and 1,000 stringers around the world but none near the site, “so for the first 24 hours the best and the only photos and video came from tourists armed with 1.3 megapixel portable telephones, digital cameras and camcorders. And if you didn’t have those pictures you weren’t on the story.”

But so far, Jay says, NowPublic hasn’t really done much in terms of organizing an editorial team that can be mobilized for such events, perhaps in part because the site is hoping people will spontaneously organize themselves.

“There’s a tendency to think that citizen journalism will happen by itself if you build a good platform and let the community emerge because a) it sometimes happens, usually around crisis events, and b) if it did arise ‘naturally’ the elusive dream of radically reduced labor costs might be around the corner, and c) it’s appealingly bottom-up logic to say: give people the tools and get out of the way.”

Rosen says that if NowPublic is going to go beyond just supplying photos or videos and the occasional eyewitness report, it will take a change in focus.

“It will have to decide that it’s a content (editorial) company with an open participation platform. And then it will have to figure out how to make its contributors into an editorial community, or news-breaking social network. Head down this path and pretty soon you’re needing editors.”

And not just editors but editors who can do some hand-holding and outreach, as Jeff points out here. In the end, Jay says that NowPublic is “something of a sleeping athlete, ready to compete in the worlds when it wakes up.”

I think there’s some truth to that — and that the company’s expanded arrangement with Associated Press gives NowPublic an incredible platform for distributing what its members produce to traditional media. It’s like the world’s largest network of “stringers,” as newspapers and other media outlets call them. That could be an amazing resource.