Well, it didn’t take long. One of my students at the University of Maryland has a brother who attends Virginia Tech and lost two friends yesterday. She started to break down as she told me she would not be in class tonight.

As everyone steps up to applaud the “citizen journalism” that occurred yesterday, with kudos upon kudos give to the cellphone video made infamous by CNN, I can’t help but think what my student’s brother thought yesterday upon seeing that video played over and over and over again.

Consider this: the video had no inherent news value and told no story.

It did have sounds of bullets being fired and screams.

Those were bullets that killed, maimed and injured students and faculty members. This wasn’t a video game.

Is such video responsible journalism? Are these the types of Citizen Journalists that people want to see? Are we doomed to create “citizen journalists” to play the I-patsies for cable television?

There were other not-so-proud moments, including the decision to publish this and then the rush to judgment reported here.

As most professional journalists who have covered breaking news and tragedy know, the facts are never clear in the first couple of hours and will likely change. And, when reporting on tragedy, two things rise above most — try not to do harm and think of those involved — both victims and their families. It means slowing down. And, thinking, should I really whip out my cellphone here?

Cable television long ago threw out the baby with the bath water. Now, breaking news events are an opportunity for ratings as viewers watch tragedy unfold. Journalism? Hardly. Students who were in shock were interviewed regularly, with the final question of “how are you feeling” inevitably searching for a sob. Watching tragedy unfold via cable news is the soap opera of the modern era. It’s hardly journalism.

Which brings us back to our heralded cell-phone videographer yesterday. The London bombing showed us how anyone with a cell phone can capture images. But, that was after a news event had occurred. Our heralded citizen journalist captured sounds of people being killed, injured and maimed yesterday as it occurred.

Is this really the type of behavior to applaud, to train citizen journalists to take part in? More importantly, what’s the news here?

Finally, step back for a second. Play the video. And, imagine you have a son or daughter attending Virginia Tech, you can’t get ahold of them and you turn on CNN to find out some information and instead you come across that video.

When I first started reporting, way, way, way back in the day, I remember my excitement at getting a piece of mail from the public. Every now and then there was the hate mail. My favorite was getting a card with a picture of a German shepherd on it, with the contents of the letter referring to me repeatedly as a dog. It was nice to get mail, but the audience was always at arm’s length, allowing me to shrug off the hate mail.

The Web changed everything. As an editor at The Washington Post’s Web site for 10 years, I saw the audience become more and more involved in the process. Readers who could quiz editors and newsmakers in live discussions can now e-mail editors and reporters directly with story ideas and comments.

The comments board on most blogs on the Web is the Wild Wild West — allowing readers to offer their thoughts on content and writing. Anyone can start a blog and citizen journalism has become much more than discussion fodder for conferences. The London bombings demonstrated how anyone with a cell phone is capable of reporting on events.

Today, citizen journalism takes a step forward with the unveiling of Assignment Zero. After years of hearing the internal journalistic debates of “who is a journalist,” Jay Rosen proposed last year to bring together the best qualities of professional journalists and citizen journalists under one umbrella. He then assembled an amazing team of editors, developers and designers who spent the last several months making his vision reality.

It’s a simple concept recently, one Jay dubbed “pro-am journalism.” Assignment Zero will use the crowd to do much of the traditional legwork needed to do go reporting — the first story will examine the history and practice of crowdsourcing. The crowd will be assisted by professional editors and the final product will run on Wired, New Assignment and elsewhere on the Web.

The theory is that by using a large pool of reporters, you get more sourcing, more anecdotes, better reporting, and ultimately, a better story.

Some have warned me not to oversell the concept. But it’s hard not to get excited over this revolutionary approach to journalism. Imagine using this setup to examine larger issues — education, poverty, foreign policy. The sky’s the limit.

I remember back when I was reporting how readers would often be frustrated by their inability to impact the journalistic process. More than once I would hear laments that letters to the editor was the only way for readers to offer thoughts and comments on the process.

Those days are gone. The closed doors have been opened. Not only do you, the reader, get to be a part of the process, but we’re inviting you in and allowing you to pick how you want to be involved. We’re listened and we’ve responded. Go check out Assignment Zero. Journalism will never be the same.

Before coming to washingtonpost.com last Fall, Rob Curley was the unofficial seer of online journalism. He helped “converge” one of the first newsrooms at the Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World, where he and his team of “geeks” (Curley’s favorite term) first began to tinker around the edges of database and community journalism. At the Naples (Fla.) Daily News, Curley continued his innovative ways, creating an online-only video news operation modeled after your local television broadcast.

Curley and his team of developers have been fairly quiet since their arrival in Washington last October. This week, washingtonpost.com unveiled a big video project titled onBeing and it’s got Curley’s fingerprints all over it. The “cool” stuff that Curley is known for includes being able to go the ITunes page for the feature, and being able to download the package to a host of other platforms — including your PSP player or your video phone. The video, conceived and shot by washingtonpost.com videographer Jennifer Crandall, is high quality — no surprise there given the pool of multimedia talent at The Post.

There is a sort of reverse narrative at work with the video essay. Users get very little information when you click into the project; you’re given a short intro box and then four faces. You click on one and then listen to an interview, although it’s not really an interview — more like a person talking to you about, well, whatever. So, I randomly click on the Asian woman, her name pops up and then I listen to about 2 minutes of her talking about cheese. The title of the piece comes at the end: “On being a cheesemaker.”

Then another cool thing pops up — a comments area overlays on top of the video, with comments from Crandall and users. The text from Crandall includes this: “Not too long ago, she survived a brain tumor which explains her mandate to do whatever the hell she wants to in life.” Interesting. All of a sudden I understood why this person’s story should be worth my while. But it took time.

So, what is this? Inverting the inverted pyramid? Blowing up the inverted pyramid altogether? It’s an interesting approach. High up on the cool factor. But, how many people bailed after 30 seconds of the cheese rant? As my old boss used to tell me: “Get them engaged early and keep them engaged.”

The journalistic storytelling experiment is admirable and very much in the traditions of Web journalism. But what makes me wonder about the success of this project is it’s premise, which is spelled out in the introduction: “onBeing is a project based on the simple notion that we should get to know one another a little better.”

You, you, you.

All this consternation about TIME magazine’s pick of “You” as the person of the year! As my colleague John McQuaid pointed out, there are still plenty of non-believers out there having problems grasping the concepts and potential behind this new fangled Internet thing.

Well, folks, you better get on board, and quickly. In the spirit of New Year’s predictions, I’m going to go far out on a limb and declare 2007 as the true year of “You.” Better yet, it’s when “You” graduates from toddler status. So, given that it’s the time of year for predictions, I provide you with my own informal Top 10 list of predictions — some serious, some not so much.

1. There will be at least two dozen Web sites devoted to the upcoming presidential election by the end of the year. It’s happening already, but the 2008 election cycle is shaping up to resemble the 2000 run-up, when dozens of Web sites cropped up to cover the campaign and election. The question this time around, will any of those sites have the legs to survive after Election Day?

2. One of those new Web sites — The Politico — will struggle and by year’s end, some of the talent in place now will have left. I’m hedging my bets here a bit because I’m willing to give John Harris and Jim VandeHei, former colleagues at The Washington Post, the benefit of the doubt. Still, I’m not convinced that they understand the concept behind multimedia presentation. It’s more than having your writers talk at the cameras and appear on televised news programs. How long will it take them to get that?

3. Speaking of The Post, after more than a decade of separation, the news operation there will follow the lead of the New York Times and USA Today and converge their print and Web operations by year’s end. The two operations are already headed in that direction. (Full disclosure: I worked at washingtonpost.com for 10 years.)

4. My parents will finally break down and get TiVo.

5. YouTube will continue to make news and drive news cycles. At least one (more) presidential candidate will be forced to drop out of the running because of a faux pas caught on video. Also expect more video from Iraq – with images from the ground adding fuel to the ongoing debate over the war in the U.S.

6. Journalism programs across the country will swamp the job market in search of professionals to teach this new-fangled convergence concept. Some programs are ahead of the curve, some catching up, but most now realize that the industry is changing and educators need to change their approach away from solely teaching the concepts behind the inverted pyramid.

7. My 8-year-old son will have his own blog by year’s end.

8. The left vs. right war within the blogosphere will again heat up (did it ever cool down?) as the presidential campaign cycle kicks into gear. Bloggers will find themselves in a crisis, however, as to whether to be shills for a particular candidate or continue to maintain their independence.

9. Bruce Springsteen will go back on tour.

10. And, finally, NewAssignment.Net will be a resounding success. Ok, I couldn’t pass this one up. But, based on the experiences of other groups and organizations, the philosophy behind meshing the best of professional journalists, the crowd and the blogosphere seems to be unveiling at just the right time.

Well, we’ll see. In the meantime, have a Happy New Year – it’s going to be a wild one.

The journalism world is catching up to NewAssignment.Net. It’s impossible to avoid that conclusion today if you follow the news industry site, Romenesko. (We do.)

Michael Hirschorn’s article in the Atlantic is the latest in what appears to be a series on how to save newspapers. His advice: “stop printing.”

“With few exceptions, the media businesses thriving on the Web either are low-cost blog-like efforts or follow a many-to-many model, in which communities create, share, and consume content. Publishing an article on the Web gets you one click; getting your users to write the article for you gets you a thousand clicks, and costs less to boot. In other words, turning your users into contributors increases their engagement with your site—each click is, after all, also an “ad impression”—while simultaneously generating more content that you in turn can sell to advertisers.”

His suggestion sounds eerily familiar to what we at Assignment.Net are attempting— with the caveat that we’re not a commercial site.

As the midterm elections quickly pass into memory, focus is now switching to the 2008 presidential question and what role the Internet will play.

That’s no longer a negative thing.

At a panel discussion on “Trends in Political Blogging,” sponsored by the George Washington University Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet Wednesday, there was the usual debate over who is a blogger, who is reading blogs and whether or not blogs are providing a real revolution in communication.

Not much new there.

But one word that was mentioned several times—and we at NewAssignment.Net applaud this—was “transparency.” While professional campaigners may not necessarily welcome the onset of more transparency, this cycle will likely require them to be more open with the peeking public. “Blogs have forced the media and politicians to be transparent; you can’t get away with much anymore… you get called on it immediately,” said CNN’s Jacki Schechner.

Every now and then, you read a piece where you have to stop, take a breath and then go back and make sure you actually just read that.

Peter Scheer, billed as a lawyer, journalist and executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition, columnizes in the San Francisco
Chronicle that newspapers and wire services, to help protect their collective bottom lines, should embargo their news content from the “free Internet” for about 24 hours.

Here’s more:

“A temporary embargo, by depriving the Internet of free, trustworthy news in real-time, would, I believe, quickly establish the true value of that information. Imagine the major Web portals — Yahoo, Google, AOL and MSN — with nothing to offer in the category of news except out of date articles from “mainstream” media and blogosphere musings on yesterday’s news. Digital fish wrap.”

Hmm, ok. So, let me get this straight. A First Amendment attorney AND a “journalist” is proposing to withhold information from a part of the population? And Scheer has even thought about how to keep the pesky lawmen away:

So, exactly how did the (Fort Myers, Fla.) News-Press succeed in its efforts at crowdsourcing with its investigation into utility rates in Cape Coral, Fla.?

Earlier in the summer, the News-Press asked for citizens help in investigating ongoing concerns over price hikes in their utility assessments, due to extensions of the systems. The community responded in full force – and through the newspaper (not because of it) did the journalism that got their concerns addressed.

The News-Press operation has gained some notoriety since Gannett’s big reorganization announcement last week. Gannett’s decision to rename the newsrooms at its 90 newspapers as “information centers” is part of a larger philosophical move to focus on cross-platform distribution and citizen journalism. For the most part, those inside and outside the industry applauded the move and a recent investigation by the News-Press newspaper and Web operation, owned by Gannett, has been cited as an early success story in the effort. (For another perspective, check out this and for good roundup coverage, check out Jeff Howe’s summary.)

But, what about these citizen journalists? What motivates citizens to take part in such an enterprise?

As one citizen journalist put it, “it helps to have a dog in the race.”

Citizen journalism is a term that for years has drawn a visceral and negative reaction from professional journalists. But it may be on its way to some respectability in journalistic circles after Gannett’s announcement on Friday to fundamentally alter the way news is gathered at its many properties.

Say goodbye to the daily tunnel vision. Gannett’s newspapers will now have reporters and editors focused on delivering local news across multiple platforms. And they’ll be finding ways to use the locals to get out the news. (See CEO Craig Dubow’s memo about the changes.)

Gannett is the company that brought a journalistic revolution in 1982 with USA Today — a newspaper that was dominated by short stories, big pictures, info-graphics and lots and lots of color. At the time, professionals at many of the major institutions dismissed Gannett’s efforts. Just part of the dumbing down of America, they said. Today we realize there was a lot of innovation there.

Newspapers, including Gannett’s, have traditionally operated in silos: national reporters and editors covered national news, photographers took care of the images, etc. Gannett takes all these traditions and throws them out the window. The focus will be on delivering information, not job titles and section loyalties.

As I waited for the train to New York in Hartford last week, a man overwhelmed with about five bags asked me where the bathroom was. He was disheveled; a bit disorganized, had a slight accent and left all his bags next to me as he went off to look for the bathroom. In another time and place, there was an unspoken bond — I would watch out for his things. Instead, alarm bells went off. Two words flashed on my internal breaking news ticker: “Unattended Bags.”

I had to check my paranoia though since he had only been gone for minutes, but in a defensive move I’m not exactly proud of, I got up and moved to the other side of the waiting area. I actually headed toward a concrete wall, thinking I might be protected from any explosion.

As I walked away, the traveler came back from the bathroom, and gave me a puzzled look — as if I had broken the silent pact between travelers. Mentally, I shrugged. Another 9/11 casualty.