morning post

by Jay Rosen

Assignment Zero launched on March 14. Evan Hansen and I consulted at the four-week mark and determined that the project should run about seven more weeks but that we couldn't wait until everything was done to show some initial results. So here's what we decided to do, as explained by Evan in this letter to Assignment Zero participants. For contributors, there's news in it about getting published and about a new role for AZ editor Lauren Sandler.

It's been a month since the launch of Assignment Zero, and it's amazing to see how much has been accomplished so far.

As editor-in-chief of Wired News, and a co-founding member and editorial advisor on AZ, I'm thrilled with the results to date.

We've got some 900 participants and 40 or so topic pages that will soon have dedicated editors. We've already produced a new and improved version of the AZ platform, incorporating insights based on the experience of running an open source journalism site.

The last leg of this collaboration is approaching. We have a strong site and a big enough community; distributed research is starting to come in. Now we need to take this raw material and turn it into something. Clearly, the final results are still wide open.

Given the breadth of our efforts so far, and the work yet to be done, Jay and I sat down in the past week to discuss what we need as a group to cross the last mile. And it occurred to us that one thing that might help everyone would be to have a concrete example of what we're doing: a completed piece of writing.

It's one thing to generate raw material. But what is all of this going to look like as a finished work of journalism? We don't really know at this point. And that could be a problem as 40 separate topics lurch to completion all at once.

In my role as editorial advisor, I suggested it might be useful to know what's required to take AZ reporting and publish it on pro news web site like Wired.com.

Jay agreed.

If we were to fork the project at this point, and select some small piece of it for a "first wave" or trial run to completion, we could discover a lot about what we had. And that could help the rest of the group as we shift gears from the hunting and gathering phase to the writing and editing itself.

We came up with a plan to execute exactly this: a publishable article, based on AZ reporting, completed with the help of the AZ community, to appear on Wired.com by the end of the month.

To continue reading, please visit Jay's blog entry.

David Cohn with the morning post today.

Now we have topic home pages. They come with a slew of features, and I'm working with our developers on a few more.

So what now?

It's time to reach out our hands and ask the blogosphere for help.

After you join a team, the best thing to do is to try and find more team members. Collaborative journalism is a little different from shoe-leather reporting. Eventually we will need to really go out and do the interviews and get the quotes, but we should never feel like we are doing that alone. Luckily if we are, there is an easy solution -- ping the blogosphere.

Everything that we are covering is a hot topic in the blogosphere. There are probably dozens of blogs each dedicated to these topics. Why not point out a relevant topic home page to them? They are already informed about the subject and so are their readers -- that's exactly the community that we want to tap.

For example, I intend to email Design Observer, EyeBeam Reblog and World Changing about some of our art and design topics. Imagine if they re-blog it! Who knows how many motivated community members we could get -- and they would have knowledge about specific topics too?

Now imagine if we ALL do that. There are 55 million blogs out there. I can't hit them all.

It might have been hard to do this kind of outreach before, but now that we have topic home pages -- it's as easy as forwarding a link. So if there is a topic you've been working on and you want to see more people working on it -- be the change that you want to see. Spread the links around and I bet somebody out there will not only join the team, they'll thank you for showing them how they too can finally report on a topic that they love.

Contributor Mike Ho sent us a long email about transparency on the site. Here are some very brief excerpts from his email:

I wonder if this thing isn't *too* transparent... I don't think it's appropriate for people to see our sausage being made, so to speak; much of what's posted is written unprofessionally or stolen wholesale from other site... What does transparency mean to you? What are we trying to accomplish?

I asked Jay to respond to Mike. Here are his comments in full:

No, transparency does not require publishing everything you think the moment you think it. Nor does it eliminate the need for good judgment, shrewd common sense and a certain prudential quality in making decisions about how to proceed. Not everything you do in gathering information has to be recorded at the site. That's an extreme demand that quickly becomes unworkable. But it illustrates how a worthy principle like transparency can become an absurdity if we lose sight of the "why" of it.

In our case, the main reason it would be a good idea to post preliminary reporting or open a thread for good questions to ask, say, Jimmy Wales is simply to gain the practical benefit of having many eyes on the material. So that's one way of knowing when transparency makes the most sense: situations where the many eyes effect could make a real difference.

In general, it's a good idea for Assignment Zero editors and contributors to explain what they are doing so lurkers, people who are thinking of contributing, and those who come after can know. That's a kind of transparency that's directly connected to the goals of the project.

A fine example of this comes from one of the Sunlight Foundation's crowdsourced investigations of earmarks is Congress. A contributor named Mrs Panstreppon did a bit of work investigating earmarks and then told everyone how she did it. The benefit to those coming after is obvious. (See "Taking Earmark Research to the Next Level." )

Also, since we are drawing on contributions from people who are not expected to be professionally neutral and clinically detached, we need to practice the kind of transparency where interests and stakes are disclosed, so that onlookers can judge for themselves. That kind of transparency makes good practical sense. And it answers one of your questions (a great question): what we are trying to accomplish with transparency? In the case of disclosure we are trying to build trust when we cannot rely on a professionally neutral staff.

One of your questions has come up several times before when I have discussed Assignment Zero with journalists: if everything is out in the open, how do you prevent competitors from stealing your stories and sources from gaining an advantage?

My answer to the first question--competitors--has been, "For a variety of reasons I don't think it will happen," but of course I don't know that for certain. If it does I'll worry about it then. To the second question, I have never believed that good interviews arise from sources being surprised by "killer" questions. Maybe in certain highly confrontational interviews that happens. Usually, it does not.

Still, if there are particular interviews where keeping confidential what we know and intend is necessary to get information vital to the project, I would advise the editor and reporter to do just that. Also, in no way does a posted list of "good questions to ask..." constitute the limit of what can be asked. That does not make sense to me.

I think it is good, when you come back from an interview, to post what you learned and what the person said; all the informative quotes. I think it is unwise of us to insist that every burp and ahem get posted. Again, shrewd common sense is a better guide than treating transparency as a god who must be obeyed. If a contributor posted an edited transcript, with the repetitive, uninteresting, unintelligible or unproductive parts left out, I would not consider this a violation of our creed. I would consider it prudential.

Finally, you write, "I wonder if this thing isn't too transparent." That's definitely possible, and if it proves to be so we will adjust what we are doing, and try to incorporate the lessons of this project into the next. We're trying to be practical, and we are also trying to do things differently, not for the sake of being different, but to get the benefits of openness.

I hope that helps.... Cheers.

JR

It was never our goal to cover every topic which is currently on the Assignment Desk. We wanted to launch with a rather inclusive list of the people, projects, and ideas which constitute these early days of crowdsourcing. Then we planned add more topics as the crowd suggested them. Then we'd see what people wanted to cover most -- voting with their feet. Then we'd apply a bit of editorial guidance, asking editors to help us cut away the topics which haven't generated interests, but leaving some which seem essential to the larger story.

It's time to grab those shears, editors! Which means, reporters and writers, if there's a unreported topic you want in on, speak up! 'Cause next week it might be... gone.

This doesn't mean we are going to cut everything that hasn't been reported yet. Nor does it mean we won't still be adding new topics. It just means that we're going to begin to hone this story to give it focus. So stake your claims. Add comments to this post if there's anything you want to be absolutely positive I haven't missed (that suggestion thread in the Exchange is long and wooly, and while we're keeping an eye on it, it never hurts to make sure I know about something here on the Scoop).

I'll be contacting editors later today to talk in detail about scaling back, so we can keep moving forward.

Maurreen pointed that E.Mo's blog post on unwise crowds raises questions of citations. (I linked to this post a couple of days ago.) E.Mo had posted an essay he found on another blog, and hyperlinked the word "source" to the source. He didn't clearly credit the author or the blog.

Technically, this is ok. But, as Amanda put it when the team discussed the issue yesterday, "it's bad form." And many of us have probably seen our work go up on someone else's site without being being credited, and we know it's no fun.

Within this puzzle lies a mystery of the blogosphere: if E.Mo's blog was "published" in a traditional "go to press" journalism sense, it would be disastrous to run the full text of someone's work with only a link to where they are credited. (Though, to that effect, to run it without their permission -- or a contract -- even with a full credit, would be disastrous. Bear with me here.) E.Mo posting something interesting to his blog isn't the same thing as including it in our edited, fact-checked package which we will run at the end of the project.

In fact, a lot of what we're asking you folks to do in gathering reporting is to find other reporting on the topics you're covering and offer it up to writers as background -- whether in small quotes and summaries, large chunks, or the whole shebang. My sense from E.Mo's post is what he found something that could inform the reporting and writing of our crowd, and so he made it available, which was a terrific thing to do. Again, should he have fully cited it? Sure. That would have been preferable.

But beyond the question of protocol, let me share a little bit of wisdom about fact-checking: in your filed reporting or on your AZ blog, if you don't cite where you're finding hard information and quotes, you set yourself up in two ways: Writers and editors may be less likely to use what you're feeding them, since they don't know where it's coming from, and therefore how credible it might be. (Is that stat or quote from someone doing p.r. for a project? a participant? an impartial observer? All very different things.)

And, if you don't cite now, you'll have to go through and find every source for everything that ends up in the final work once we hit the fact-checking phase. I, for one, am a cautionary tale in this regard. I get so wrapped up in the momentum of reporting that I do a lousy job keeping track of where I've found everything. And that means when a magazine is ready to fact-check my work (and that's when it's convenient, and usually urgent, for them, not me), I have to drop everything I'm doing and spend an afternoon furiously hunting around for that elusive link, book, or page in a notebook.

Don't be like me, kids. Cite for your own sanity, and for the sanity of others.

We've been watching the development of the crowdsourcing law enforcement topic with great interest. As would fit the subject matter, it's been a narrative of conflict and
suspense... and I'm just talking about about the team working on the story.

Soon after we launched, Steve asked Robin Mizell to write the piece, and she ran at it with all the zeal and energy any editor could hope for from a reporter. She has posted regularly in the reporters' notebook, set up an email list of contributors who would be researching alongside her, kept terrific discussions going about her topic, and served as a great example to us all.

Robin had a fearless concept about how she wanted to cover her story. She wanted to use crowdsourcing to catch a criminal herself. A cool idea. But not one within our rubrik of reporting. Unless you're doing first-person, gonzo-style journalism, stepping directly into the story and shifting its outcome by your actions is the opposite of what traditional journalism does, and, even within our radical venture here, not what we at Assignment Zero are doing. Catching a criminal and reporting on it is a classic example of that type of story. While it's not something we're not looking to do within the scope of AZ's reporting, it might make for a hell of a piece if Robin wants to try it on her own and file an essay along the lines of "I Was a Crowdsourced Cop." Jay spoke with Robin about her idea, and suggested that if she wants to take on that challenge outside of Assignment Zero, we'd be interested to see what she comes up with, and possibly run a piece.

(In spite of all of this drama, Robin still interviewed an investigator with the Florida Dept. of Law Enforcement and wrote up her reporting. We appreciate it, Robin.)

Is the plot thick enough for you? Well, then there was another twist in the story -- more the stuff of Ben Bradlee than Raymond Chandler, but I think it's worth sharing as another development.

We brought Jesse Wegman onto our team to edit our law stories, of which this would have been one. It turns out that while Robin was developing her crimefighting plans, Jesse was writing for the Huffington Post about his take on Peverted Justice, the site which is a central focus of this topic. Like Robin, Jesse can be a bit of a firebrand -- which I admire in both cases -- and wrote a very opinionated piece critiquing this type of law enforcement. Jesse filed this in the law enforcement reporters' notebook last week, (to which contributor R William King filed a response) and is abstaining from editing this story. He wrote on his blog,

I wanted to make it available here in case you're interested in reading it, but also so that no one feels I have some hidden agenda about this or any other topic here. I do have my opinions, and I'd be happy to hear from any of you who agree or disagree, but in my role as an editor I have no interest in pushing one position or the other; I just want to help develop the most well-researched and comprehensively sourced stories out there.

Our contributors working on crimefighting will report to Andrew Nelson for editing. (Steve has been editing this project, and is now putting it off into Andrew's capable hands, just as he's passing off all the existing topics to our new editors.) Thanks, guys, for doing such a bang-up job so far, and for giving the project a little dose of noir.

David had a blast at yesterday's meet-up. Here's his report:

It was great to meet people like Michael Ho, who has already taken a lead on a few different reporting topics for Assignment Zero. Some people get what we are doing from the get-go -- and Michael is one of them.

So is Frances, who hadn't heard of Assignment Zero until that night. Having received an email from a friend in Texas telling her to show up, she came to the 21st Amendment bar not knowing what to expect.

By the end of the night I had met around 12 Assignment Zero contributors (or soon-to-be contributors). And some were lucky enough to be around when Evan Hansen, the editor-in-chief of Wired News came to hang out.

All in all it was a great night to socialize, talk about the project, where journalism is heading in general and how we are all apart of the news process today. If real journalists get the work done at bars (as my old boss used to say), then we certainly got down to business last night.

Stay tuned for our NYC meet-up plans!