Assignment Zero is a fascinating new experiment in journalism. It uses crowdsourcing (allowing large groups of people to collectively create or build a product though small individual contributions) to report a news story. This is the long tail of information at play.
Up till recently, the information we consumed came from few centralized sources that we considered the experts. They included the news organizations, the newspapers and the magazines. The billions of viewers and readers were simple passive consumers of the information created by the few. Today, we are moving away from the centralized information model and closer to a distributed “long tail” model of information creation. We consume information that may be created by multitudes of non-experts, simply because they happen to be closer to where the information resides. We can all be both consumers and active producers of information.
Assignment Zero is using online collaboration tools such as wikis to allow anyone out there to contribute to a massively produced news story. Besides, who better to provide information on a story than the people who are directly involved in it? This could include the victims of a big storm, the participants in a demonstration, the employees of a company under investigation, or anyone else who is part of the story itself.
There have already been attempts to do that. Yahoo is letting users contribute photos and videos of events online to report what happened. They call it “You Witness News.” A NY Times article on Assignment Zero describes other efforts to produce crowdsourced journalism:
At newspapers like The Asbury Park Press in New Jersey, Florida Today in Brevard County and The News-Press in Fort Meyers, Fla., citizens can dial into databases and public records, or contribute their own experiences to provide grist for reported efforts.
A project at The News-Press on the high cost of sewer and water lines (available in the newspaper’s paid archives at www.news-press.com/apps/pbcs.dll/frontpage) included volunteer engineers going over blueprints in their spare time and an insider who disclosed critical documents.
Is there still a need for journalists and editors? Of course. Journalists can still provide the expert analysis or the focused writing that crowds cannot. And editors are necessary for all types of news stories, whether produced by a journalist or thousands of contributors, in order to keep things smooth, correct, and verified.
But where we get our information is becoming less and less centralized. It’s also (hopefully) becoming less biased and more authentic.
Posted by technodarwinism 
