NetJourn Summit: Jay Rosen’s ‘Six Lessons’ of crowdsourcing

Steve Safran October 10th, 2007

New York University Professor Jay Rosen started NewAssignment.net to explore “open source reporting.” Its big public test came with AssignmentZero, a partnership with Wired on the topic of Online Collaboration itself. Rosen says NewAssignment.net learned six key lessons…

“Progress within this area lies somewhere within these points.”

- Division of labor is key in distributed reporting projects.

Not just that lots of people have to do it, but what size tasks and what tasks do people have to do. I don’t think we know yet about what size task is right. In a professional newsroom, division of labor isn’t that big a deal. In distributed reporting, it’s a lot more complicated.

- You have to get the motivations right. If you don’t understand the motivations of the people contributing, then you can’t design the work.

- Watch for rising coordination costs. When people agree to participate, they immediately create new costs, in terms of answering emails, coordination, etc. You have to resolve this as people take up your invitation.

- If I go off and do a piece of work for you, now I have to come back and give you that data. At the moment that people give you the data, they have to be able to see how it fits into the larger picture. If it’s not clear how my piece fits, it won’t work.

- Shared background knowledge is crucial. The simple fact that all the people had been reading along in the U.S. attorney general’s story made it possible for readers to pick out the critical pieces of information.

- Existing communities already know to control coordinating information costs, how to link up and share information.

Also, a bonus seventh point:

- The One Percent Rule: About one percent of the people who might use your content might actually get involved in creating it. About ten percent might be involved in comments and boards.

Question: Where do we get funding?

Rosen: Assignment Zero was funded through Wired’s interest in exploring this area. It’s hard enough to figure out how to do this at all. To add on to it the problem of how to sustain it, we need to figure out how it contributed journalism works.

Question: What do you think was the number one motivator?

Rosen: Probably the chance of being published in Wired, and that your work would be seen by lots of people.

Audience Member Micah Sifry: What happened to the audience contributing to what topic should be contributed? That was part of your original model, and you’ve hit criticism that the topic was too big and too arcane?

Rosen: A lot of things in the original model for New Assignment I haven’t tested. There are two kinds of distributed reporting going on. One is - you have something you want to do and you do it. The other way is - you have an existing community of blogger plus very engaged readers. You could call this “naturally occurring distributed journalism.” Where readers are jumping in is in already established communities where the enthusiasm exists. Before we can get to the point where readers are choosing the story we need to build enthusiasm for NewAssignment.net and we don’t have that yet.

Rory O’Connor, NewsTrust.net: News jobs have disappeared, citizens have popped up wanting to do journalism. Do you see a role for this coming pro-am journalism, where we could marry this army of millions of citzens in a concrete way?

Rosen: I still think the hybrid forms are going to be the strongest forms. Journalists who know how to work with a network of people are going to be the most valuable to their companies. An open platform editorial system is completely antithetical to the way journalists have operated their careers. That’s starting to change, and all across the country there are people whose job it is to work with citizen contributors who are learning new skills.

The next thing NewAssignment is going to do is beat blogging - I want to find out how you do beat reporting with a social component attached. The social network becomes a tip service, copy editor, they aid the reporter.

Question: What is the sweet spot between the two?

Rosen: Training, production, the added production value that traditional newsrooms brings, fact checking is very potent. Marrying the discipline of news to the energy and bottom-up flow of citizen journalism is the sweet spot. Journalists are very good at cutting through the dross.

Question: Why frame all these things as “experiments?” Isn’t that demoralizing?

Rosen: I think that’s a good point. Doing it “for real” is better. If there’s a virtue in it, it’s that we can write about what we learned from our “experiment.” But you’re right - it’s better when you can go out and do it for real.

As soon as you try to do something new in a traditional newsroom, people say how bad it’s going to be. You can shut them up by saying “look, it’s just going to be an experiment.”