On his next Assignment project:
http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/editors/2007/10/17/jay-rosen-journalism-leaders-forum-newassignmentnet-next-project-%e2%80%93-beat-reporting-with-a-social-network/

And talking about why UK papers are two years behind the US, bit of clarification on his point.

http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/editors/2007/10/17/jay-rosen-journalism-leaders-forum-uk-newspapers-two-years-behind-the-us-equivalents-in-audience-interaction/

I was thinking the same thing in the post. I think there are a lot of people ‘getting it’ out there. Shame there aren’t more

The new project sounds interesting

I like the way the off the bus people are credited.

It would be great if there was one link that would take me to an ‘off the bus page’ with links to reports quoted. A kind of bibliography (or blogliography) for the piece.

I was thinking more about the broad middle of the news profession and where they are in understanding the challenge of the Web and changing balance of power.

Second, about this…”And if you don’t think you we have a way to go on that front, you ask any newspaper journalist if they are prepared to share their byline with any of the people they ‘crowsourced’ or the citizen journalists they used….”

here’s a link you can use next time you make that point. It’s distributed reporting of the Obama campaign with 25 or so contributors attending the same kind of Obama events all over the country, and then pooling reports. This is NewAssignment.Net’s second project, OffTheBus.Net, with oartners the Huffington Post.

And here’s a brief sketch of a third project: beat blogging with a social network. I am signing up newspaper beat reporters who want to test this approach. Hope to have 10-12 trying it simultaneously. I did mention this at the UK forum Tuesday.

Cheers…..

I agree they have a bigger pot to choose from. But my point would be that even given more people that would just be more Audience to most UK media outfits and not more opportunity to engage.

For me the parochial element of all of this is the not recognising that there is anyone outside of the ‘media’ village. Citizen journalists or informed contributors are incomers not members of the community.

I though Andy’s comments where interesting too given that it eventually became clear that he was the niche - his position as the got guy on Italian football for example - and past expert at exploiting a niche - the fanzine and books he writes. I don’t think his experiences validated, or highlighted any benefit from, a “non-web” strategy.

But I did think his experience highlighted how the web can help empower and inform niche exploiters – the example he gave of tapping in to fan forums – and how the big media doesn’t get that way of working. Better still it showed how it keeps him ahead of the MSM.

A fact that seems to have passed a lot of journos by given many organisations apparent refusal to let them enage on those platoforms by blocking them.

It’s a good point

In his post mortem, Jay quotes Assignment Zero contributor Derek Powazek on why more people didn’t get on board: “it’s because they[the public] haven’t decided if it’s worth doing them for you yet.”

You’re right in that they can be google ad’ing their way past you in terms of revenue so why help you.

But I kind of think that’s the point. The motivation behind the project was to see if it would open the door to that kind of collaboration - collaboration on an equal footing that’s been missing. Not can we make this work as a successful revenue model for media organisations.

It was an exercise in testing the relationships and we, the mainstream media helped it fail because of the quality of that relationship. For me that’s why it stayed in the lab.

Too much localism is parochialism. Lets think about it from that perspective.

I was intrigued by the comments of Andy Mitten who has resisted the lure of the internet andfeels that his niche market in football journalism should be paid for by the user.Do you believe that this is a model that can continue to survive?