Early experiments in “crowdsourcing” shake up old media Once, there were publications, there were readers, and any exchange between the two occurred on the Letters to the Editor page. Now the line between the two has blurred to the point that readers are becoming auxiliary members of the editorial staff.“One thing that publications have to acknowledge is that readers know a lot, and that [publications] can access their knowledge and interest and expertise,” said Sreenath Sreenivasan, a professor at the Columbia School of Journalism. Tapping social networks and the wisdom of the readers — or “crowdsourcing,” as some call it — is an increasingly important element of many publications. NewAssignment.net, a non-profit venture launched in 2006 by New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen has attracted more than 700 volunteers to work alongside professional journalists on AssignmentZero, a collaborative effort to report on the crowdsourcing phenomenon. As Rosen sees it, citizen journalism is a natural product of the Web, which, from its origins at the CERN physics laboratory, was intended to be a collaborative platform to link information residing on geographically dispersed computers. “He wasn’t trying to invent a platform for InfoWorld or CNN to distribute its product,” Rosen said, referring to Tim Berners-Lee. “He thought he was creating a new platform for people to collaborate on things. The Web was born as a collaboration mechanism.” Rosen’s AssignmentZero takes that vision and applies it directly to the practice of journalism in its most radical form, taking cues from the free software and open source software movements. “What we’re trying to do is figure out if we can take one story and divide it up into parts, then ask lots of people to develop those parts into pieces, get those pieces back, fact check and edit them, then publish a story,” Rosen said. Print publications saw that their content could be repurposed online, but failed to see the Web’s other possibilities, Rosen added. “What you’re not doing is asking the question about what else the Web can do.” NewAssignment is all about asking those questions. Rosen imagines deep integration among readers, contributors, and “professionals,” with topic-specific pages providing a focal point to complete assignments and assemble vital pieces of the puzzle. Users will be able to read finished articles or drill down to pages of notes, interviews, and other reporting. At the same time, contributors will be free to use the products of their labor for their own blogs or other online ventures. Citizen journalism is catching on elsewhere, even at newspaper chains such as Gannett, which has recently embraced crowdsourcing. Gannett said it is replacing newsrooms with “information centers” that combine the ideas of readers and journalists. Similarly, InfoWorld’s IT Exec-Connect is an online meeting place that provides a platform for subject experts and IT professionals to blog, network, contribute to discussion groups, and the like. InfoWorld will build on the IT Exec-Connect community as it expands its online offerings. “Our readers are on the front lines. They know from personal experience how IT gets done in the real world,” said InfoWorld Editor in Chief Steve Fox. “IT Exec-Connect participants constitute an IT knowledge base that is open to all members.” Dan Gillmor, director of Harvard University’s Center for Citizen Media, believes citizen journalism represents a sea change. “Magazines and newspapers are just going to have to experiment — try lots of things and see which work,” he said. In the years to come, citizen journalism and crowdsourcing seem certain to broaden the definition of who is and isn’t a journalist and what is and isn’t a publication. “My hope is the ecosystem expands to include a lot of people at every level — from the blogger to the person committing a random act of journalism,” Gillmor said. “But I also hope that it takes place alongside of the preservation of what’s best about traditional media.” Technology Industry