Regret the Error

Assignment Zero has launched

A few months back, I told you about NewAssignment.net, a non-profit experiment in networked journalism and crowdsourcing. Well, today is launch day for its first assignment. Please go visit the Assignment Zero website and consider signing* up. There are roles for researchers, reporters, interviewers, fact checkers, and other talented folks. Here's some info from an open letter by project founder and leader Jay Rosen:

Inspired by the open source movement, this is an attempt to bring journalists together with people in the public who can help cover a story. It's a collaboration among NewAssignment.Net, Wired, and those who chose to participate.

The investigation takes place in the open, not behind newsroom walls. Participation is voluntary; contributors are welcomed from across the Web. The people getting, telling and vetting the story are a mix of professional journalists and members of the public -- also known as citizen journalists. This is a model I describe as "pro-am."

The "ams" are simply people getting together on their own time to contribute to a project in journalism that for their own reasons they support. The "pros" are journalists guiding and editing the story, setting standards, overseeing fact-checking, and publishing a final version.

In this project, we're trying to crowdsource a single story, and debut a site that makes other such reports possible down the road. But we don't know yet how well our site and our methods work. Our ideas are crude because they are untested. By participating, you can help us figure this puzzle out...

* CORRECTION March 16: This sentence incorrectly used the word "singing" instead of "signing." We regret the error.

Building an open source fact checking system at NewAssignment.net

NewAssignment.net is a non-profit experiment in open source reporting led by Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at NYU and the man behind the PressThink blog.
As he explained it, NAN is "a non-profit site that tries to spark innovation in journalism by showing that open collaboration over the Internet among reporters, editors and large groups of users can produce high-quality work that serves the public interest, holds up under scrutiny, and builds trust.”
Craig Silverman, the editor of this site, was recently announced as the Director of Verification for NAN. And now I'll shift to the first person to tell you more...
As part of my role at NAN, I will be helping devise a system to ensure that every fact, statistic and quote contained in a NAN article has been checked and verified. NAN stories will be researched, reported and written by a combination of experienced journalists and large groups of people from (we hope) all over the world. The fact checking process will also follow this distributed pro-am model. Experienced fact checkers will work with volunteers to ensure everything we publish meets a high standard of accuracy.
In the process, we hope to create a new model for how distributed fact checking can work, and build tools that can be used by other media outlets or reporting/research projects to manage their fact checking process.
If this project sounds interesting to you, go read my recent post at the NAN site. I've also published a report about my presentation at a BarCamp event in Montreal.
Most importantly, though, please email me if you'd like to work as a fact checker for the project. Everyone is welcome. We can't do it without you.