Open source journalism

I just wanted to let you know about my conversation with David Cohn last night about crowdsourcing. It’s a new word for a phenomenon that has brought you things like open source software development.

The idea is to bring a wide variety of people together to collaborate on a project. What everyone does, to what degree everyone gets involved is up to the individual. Usually, there is some kind of oversight that governs efforts. Without going into further detail, that kind of self-directed structure has revolutionized the way software is being developed today.

Many speculated what could be another area where this model might take roots. How about open source journalism? Wired Magazine and Jay Rosen, a professor at NYU, are now trying to write a news story that way. The topic is crowdsourcing itself and the clever idea is to use the means of crowdsourcing to create an article about crowdsourcing. The web site where this is happening is http://zero.newassignment.net/ Anyone can go there, read up on what has been said and contribute either by as little as dropping a line or if inclined by taking on a bigger assignment. All these attempts are managed by a few editors from wired.com who bring their professional expertise to an all out effort to write this article that is slanted to be published in Wired Magazine later this spring.

David Cohn is a graduate student at Columbia’s School of Journalism who is working on this project as an associate editor. He was in town to catch up with Wired Magazine and posted a message that he’ll be hanging out at a bar along with a few editors from Wired Magazine. It shouldn't come as a surprise, that he is very enthusiastic about the whole idea of getting people to collaborate on a specific project just because they want to instead of that they have to. It should be interesting to watch whether this kind of open source journalism really catches on and if so, what it does to traditional journalism, blogging, and last but not least the PR profession.