NewAssignment.net: Jay Rosen’s optomistic push for online community-journalism
Jay Rosen is a smart person approaching journalism from a different angle, attempting to find new ways to make this mess work. That in itself is an important endeavor, as I’m sure most of us would agree that there are several aspects of traditional journalism that have, if not completely broken down, at least begun to show their age.
NewAssignment.net is Rosen’s optimistic plan to steer the success of open-source, community-based software development into the hands of our society in need of better journalism, and more community engagement in social issues.
It’s an interesting idea which has potential. But, as I’m sure Rosen would agree, the idea faces many hurdles. Rosen seems to be considering many of those potential problems, but some seem to have fallen through the cracks.
First off, let’s consider Rosen’s idea of building on Mozilla’s success in engaging a community of users to debug software. It’s good that he sees a correlation and wants to learn from Firefox’s successes (and failures).
But the two subjects (software and journalism) aren’t analogous.
Geeks who sit in front of their computers all day are largely a disconnected demographic almost screaming for a chance to participate in a way that makes them feel like they matter. And if they’re surfing the net anyway, how much effort does it take to log the problems with their browser? Even if it takes minutes or hours, there are a large number of people out there who have the time and inclination to do so.
But most of them aren’t going to be willing to go out into the community they’re likely already marginally disconnected with, and gather data or do reporting.
So newassignment.net will have a different user base than Mozilla. Again, Rosen would likely agree.
So who will the user base be? Rosen might say “Who knows? We’ll find that out after we launch.” But ideally, newassignment participants would be people who are looking for a way to participate in their community, yet haven’t found it. They would also need a certain amount of free time, and be computer users of some sort.
The problem, I think, is that in large part this community doesn’t exist. People who genuinely want to be engaged in their community likely already are in some form. Maybe Rosen could get the odd soccer mom who’s involved in the PTA or the community board to report back marginally. But she isn’t going to have to time to filter out the data that is useful to others from the data that isn’t. She’s got kids to put to bed, and in this economic atmosphere, probably a job to get to in the morning.
As I said before, there may be a few people here or there, but not the thousands that would be needed to make newassignment an overwhelming success. At the very least, building the user base will be an uphill battle. If the first newassignment project wins a Pulitzer or something, maybe that will pull enough people in. But will it keep them there, keep them engaged? Only time will tell.
The other major problem is who choose as the first editor. While I like the idea of Josh Marshal, the other half of the political spectrum won’t be so pleased at the choice of someone so easily pegged as partisan.
In an atmosphere where building a user base is going to be the main challenge, cutting that group in half before you project even gets off the ground is a big danger.
Sure, conservatives could counter Marshals’ project by creating a parallel of their own. But it’s more than likely they’ll just dismiss it (and newassignment) as another “liberal blog,” and only pay attention to it when it gets attacked on the Drudge Report.
It seem to me that the only solution to avoid limiting the user base and avoiding claims of partisanship, is either hire someone that most people agree is middle-of-the-road, which is probably impossible because people won’t agree, or hire two editors from the start, who are at opposite ends.
Two disparate editors would also help in that they would likely become competitive, as would their followers. That might just produce better results.
Though it could also end in a mudslinging mess.
I’d like to avoid making prognostications about what might be, and just wait and see. I, like Rosen, am a media optimist. I want to believe that something like this could work. I’ve just seen too many good ideas fail in the past, for reasons similar to the ones mentioned above.
And I also know that hard-working, intelligent Americans who spend time and effort creating something of social or economic value like to be rewarded in some way. Geeks with free time might be willing to spend a few minutes a day to debug code. But journalists, even citizen journalists, want to get paid for going out into the world and reporting.
If you can’t even offer them a byline, they’re probably going to point their Firefox browser somewhere else.
