Where's the Beef?

I think for some, tasks and lists are better; for others, that's not the case.

But I think as it stands you're right in that I think the assignment desk could have greater/better/different organization and/or functionality.

"It's like a whole bunch of soundbites are submitted and somehow all of them have to be listened to see if a meaning can be gleaned from them."

OK, help me out please -
I read through Sanger's Slashdot memoir, and have read Nicholas Carr's roughtype columns trashing Wikipedia, and have read between the lines of the writeups of our AZ interviews with Sanger (in which it sounds to me like S imposed limitations on what the interviewer could and couldn't say, that S is the one in control; advice from Halberstam: never, never, never, let them intimidate you.) .

My impression - from S and C's writings, and from the comments responding to them, and from the interview - is that S and C do not have credibility - that one of them tends toward pedantry and flights of fancy, is promulgating a project that has little hope of success, and is prone to making sweeping general statements without providing specifics to back them up; and that the other looks to get attention by trashing things and will do so using whatever tools are at hand, not being shackled by the petty constraints of logical consistency.

IMO that's the "meaning to be gleaned" from the soundbites I've assembled and the lines I've read between. But as the 'journalist' I'm not allowed to say that; I have to find someone else who'll read what I've read and say these things for me; then I can be impartial and quote them.

So what exactly should I be doing to develop this angle - dragoon my housemate into reading the pieces and saying it for me? Specifics, please.

Part of what crowdsourcing involves, I think, is indeed listening to all those little soundbytes and then figuring out which ones work, which ones are appropriate, etc. In asking people to "contribute," what they are able to contribute varies from person to person. So, some will contribute links that need investigation. Links might be the info they want to, and have the time to share with the folks on the topic.

Contributing links, and a line or two about them, though, is a blogger-y way of doing things. That goes back to the very early days of blogging, when a lot of it was about how getting input on the code one was working on, or about sharing cool stuff one found on the Internet. What we now call "social bookmarking," as with del.icio.us and stumble upon, is related to these old ways of blogging. Remember, too, that back in the olden days of the Internet--the '90's ;-) -- the idea of being social *and* writing long-form stuff just wasn't part of the landscape. "Websites" were clunky and you had to know a lot of HTML for them to make sense. So the ethos of "here's the link, check it out" still colors a lot of blogging (you should read the pro-con arguments re posts and length!). It ends up also affecting nascent crowdsourcing reporting and info-collecting methodologies.

Those of us who are working on participation (myself, Amanda, and David a bit) would like to know what we can do to help. Would a shout-out for more reporting help? And on what topics? We're also trying to figure out if folks feel they have to be professionals to do the reporting (some editors have received email to that effect). Do y'all think that maybe a post on the Scoop featuring profiles of different reporters might be helpful? Just let us know--email or comment. Whichever works best :-)