The bad news is, I’ve been very busy. The good news: I’m busy organizing the first Networked Journalism Summit with Jeff Jarvis. It will hopefully be a great event that leads to more projects for NewAssignment.Net. You can see the work I’m doing at the News Innovation blog where there is even an interview I posted of boss Rosen, who will be a featured speaker. In the meantime - I often get notes from people who are organizing their own crowdsourced/networked journalism projects. NewAssignment.Net isn’t just dedicated to experiments that we organize - we also want to be a community place for people who are organizing projects themselves, or citizen journalists looking for something to get involved with. As such - if you have a call for volunteers, send them to me (Dcohn1 AT gmail Dot com) and perhaps we can give you a shout out.

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Today’s Call

The Fray, organized by Assignment Zero alumni Derek Powazek is looking for contributors for their first issue “Busted.” More info.

Off The Bus our own project is still looking for contributors. If you are interested, let me know - I’m not in the day-to-day, but I’ll gladly put you in touch.

Finally: The big call for the day:
Are You Being Gouged?

WNYC’s latest crowdsourcing project asks listeners to go to their local grocery store and find out the price of three goods: milk, lettuce and beer. You don’t have to buy them (or consume them), but we want to know how much they cost in different neighborhoods throughout the New York area.

Here’s the assignment:

Go to your local bodega, supermarket, or gourmet grocery store and get the prices for our predetermined basket of goods. Here’s the shopping list:

-a quart of regular, non-organic whole milk
-a head of iceberg lettuce
-a 6-pack of 12-ounce Budweiser (bottles)

Then, come back to our website and leave the following information in a comment:
-The prices of these goods
-The neighborhood where you bought them (please give exact address, or at least the block and cross street)
-The name of the supermarket
-Any distinguishing characteristic (e.g. Korean Deli, high-end retailer, etc.)
-Whether or not you were surprised (yes or no)?

You have until next Monday, October 1st to carry out the assignment. This is something you can do in the course of your regular shopping trip, but we encourage you to go the extra mile and report on neighborhoods and stores you wouldn’t normally shop in.
Next week we will report the findings, along with a map showing the most expensive and least expensive neighborhoods, and talk about what they mean on the air.