Resources

In this section you'll find links to stand-alone resources, such as a journalism guide and a glossary. Can't find what you need? Just ask our editors and we'll get you an answer. Is something missing from this list? Tell us and we'll add it.

If you're reading this page, you already know enough to be curious about where journalism may be headed.

Maybe you're a journalist who wants to be part of this grand (and down and dirty) experiment, lending your skills and experience to a project that smashes the walls between what one reporter can gather on her own, and what professional journalists can cull from the wise crowd. You may know a lot about how to report and write a traditional story, but very little about crowdsourcing.

Maybe you're a denizen of the crowdsourced world already. Perhaps you've donated your work and thinking to an existing project online, or devised such a project yourself. You might be someone already forecasting the future of how information can be gathered and disseminated online, whether at conferences or at your local bar.

Maybe you feel like you know nothing about journalism or crowdsourcing, but you want to find out – and you want do more than observe the Web 2.0 revolution from the sidelines.

Regardless, we want you involved.

We want to know what you know about open source culture (and if you're new to it, you can get up to speed with Jeff's handy guide). Do you want to interview any of the people involved in exploring this frontier? Do you want to try your hand at writing about some of the players and projects who offer success stories -- or cautionary tales? Do you want to see how everyday education or art or politics – you name it – is changing through crowdsourcing? Do you want to help us discern what assumptions about these new ventures are proving true or false?

It helps to first know a little bit about journalism. Whether you're offering us raw data, or doing a Q&A with a key thinker, or writing up big piece, you’ll find the basics helpful. These classic categories lay the foundation for most any story:

• WHO is involved in what you’re covering?

• WHAT are they doing -- and accomplishing?

• WHERE are they doing it?

• WHY are they doing it in the first place?

• HOW do they make it happen?

Give us any numbers we can use (how many volunteers offer their work to a project? how long have they been working on it? what quantifiable results have they seen?). Offer up some key anecdotes, if you can find them. And let us know what you'd like to offer to the process of reporting, writing, and publishing the story. You just want to send us an idea for an assignment? Want to research some background information? Suggest some questions for an interview? Do that interview yourself? Write up a profile? Edit on the Assignment Desk? Provide pictures, or audio, or video? Fact-check a story? You can offer us five minutes, five hours, five days, or five weeks of your time. You name it, we need it.

As a journalist myself, I’m exhilarated by the implications of what we’re building here on Assignment Zero. When I was reporting my book Righteous, about the Evangelical youth movement building in America, I would have killed for a tool that would have given me access to such a wide range of people’s experiences and thoughts, linking together such a diffuse, diverse, and personal phenomenon. What I could do on my own as one reporter was frustratingly finite. When I was in Iraq, investigating looting and rape for The Atlantic and The Nation, it would have been invaluable to have a way for experts abroad and people on the streets of Baghdad (with Internet access, of course – but you’d be surprised how many are online) to share tips, research, and their stories. Did I still need to sit down with people one-on-one, filter through the information, and surrender to the creative process of writing? Sure. The point here isn’t to replace how journalism is made, wholesale. It’s to improve it in radical new ways that were never before possible.

HL Mencken famously said that the freedom of the press is limited to those who own one. Today, it's yours. Let's see what we can do with it -- together.

Types of Stories

So, what are we looking for? There are several basic journalistic formats that you can follow with your assignment. Work closely with your editor to determine what works. He or she can give you examples of published work which align well to the scope of your own writing project. In the meantime, here's a quick look at different approaches:

The Q&A: Pretty straightforward: this is right out of the Katie Couric (or Jon Stewart) broadcast model. You’ll write an introductory paragraph or two which acquaints the reader with the subject’s work and history and some background. The rest is the edited transcript of the interview. And there's the rub: You have to sit down and transcribe the entire interview from your tape.

The Profile: This is a bit more fleshed-out piece of writing offering a deeper look into the subject. Some things to consider:

• Background. Cover the background/history of your subject/topic. The crowd will help furnish this material.
• Interviews. Not only with the subject, but with people around him or her (co-workers, collaborators, etc.) Also, make sure to get the other side. Quote critics, detractors as well. We want balanced journalism, not public relations pieces. With your editor, make sure the crowd is giving you what you need. Track down what they haven’t provided: once your byline is on your piece, its on your shoulder.
• Anecdotes. If you're profiling a person or a Web site, search for anecdotes. Get people to tell you stories. Search for details. It's the details that often sing out to readers and make them want to read more. The crowd can help here, too.
• Length. Don't get caught up in length on your first draft, just write what it deserves. But, remember, this is the Web -- people generally don't have time to read thru long magazine-style pieces. Choose your words carefully. They matter. Write what it deserves but think short.

The Big Feature: These pieces basically knit together smaller profiles of projects, comparing how they differ from each other, and what they share in common. One approach is to look at how one has succeeded where another one has failed, how they feed off each other, how they together reshape an industry or an idea. So, one example would be to look at open-source filmmaking by combining profiles of a few different projects in the works, and determining what we can learn form these projects in telling these stories. Another example would be to examine open source education by looking at different examples of open source education projects and gleaning the opportunities and/or limits that open-sourcing suggests in combating some challenges to education today.

These are all just suggestions. One of the benefits of our approach is that you, the crowd member will bring your ideas to your editor and together we will work through how to approach, write and publish the story.

Let's get to work!