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Ground Zero for Crowdsourced Journalism
By Neil Peterson | August 12, 2009
It was an experiment that, according to the opinions of volunteer contributors and paid staffers alike, ended in glorious failure. Glorious, given the innumerable lessons learned about harnessing the power of the crowd to create viable content. And a failure due to the inability to actually create the amount of content originally planned for during the design of the project. Two years after its demise, Assignment Zero is a cautionary tale – a vital chapter in the ongoing push to make legitimate the efforts – and talents – of citizen journalists.
Assignment Zero (AZ) was the brainchild of Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University, in collaboration with WIRED magazine. The premise was to use the combined skills of a crowd, muzzled by the ethical regulations of professional journalism, to write a comprehensive report on the growth of crowdsourcing.
At the time of the project’s birth, crowdsourcing was still a new, mostly unproven concept. Jeff Howe (WIRED staffer, and Executive Editor of AZ) coined the term to describe the practice of engaging a large group of community members to complete a specific task. Much like open-source software development, users are given access to a pre-defined selection of data, in order to improve, modify, and distribute the finished content. It is meant to be collaboration at its finest – with the crowd choosing the most useful content, and removing that which is not.
The hope was to complete the project with 80 feature stories. And despite initial skepticism from traditional journalism outlets – including the New York Times – AZ was, in certain ways, a modest success. When the experiment was over, AZ had seven original essays and 80+ Q&A interviews to their credit. Not outstanding, but nothing to smirk at either.
Jeff Howe – Crowdsourcing
But the true lessons of the AZ experiment lie not in the output, but in the process. Wikipedia has shown that crowdsourcing – with editorial watch-dogs and contributor restrictions – can work. But they’ve had the good fortune of 8 years of testing their product. AZ was only open to the public for 12 weeks – during which technological glitches, staff resignations, and disorganized planning significantly hampered their ability to control the crowd.
So what are the take-away’s? One of the strategic keys to crowdsourcing is the ability to mine the crowd for specialized knowledge. Newsrooms, by necessity, are closed systems. Reporters only have a specific mine of data – added to by sources and research – but given the time constraints, they can be significantly hindered in their ability to report all the facts. (An ideal example of this is the recent political unrest in Iran. As the Iranian government censored, and then shut down, outgoing international media feeds, reporters were limited in their ability to chronicle the ensuing protests and arrests. Using Twitter and YouTube, Iranians were able to tell the world of the events going on, despite otherwise closed avenues.)
Another valuable lesson was the overarching need for organization. With so many voices joining the fray, there needed to be a strong voice to guide the effort. A situation that was hindered in part by the frequently rotating roster of professional staff members. In addition, by deciding the subject matter prior to developing the community, AZ found that a lack of interest took a serious toll on the ability to find contributors. People just weren’t willing to invest their free time in writing about subjects they had little interest in. Crowdsourcing – especially for those forums in which contributors are not paid/awarded – feeds on passion.
Despite all of its shortcomings, the founders of Assignment Zero believe it was a landmark experiment in the ongoing development of this new concept. Not always perfect, in fact most often messy, AZ proved that it could be done – but not without tested parameters in place. The Internet is a chaotic, chatter-filled entity, but by learning the ways in which things will not work, we will find the keys that improve it.
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