Assignment Zero has come to a close. But the lessons learned will be used and re-used.

Today Wired published a piece from Jeff Howe: Did Assignment Zero Fail? A Look Back, and Lessons Learned.

His final assessment: “it might best be considered a highly satisfying failure. It fell far short of the original aim of producing over 80 feature stories, but in over a dozen interviews conducted by phone and e-mail, contributors uniformly described a positive, “though frequently exasperating,” experience.”

As for the work: “I found at least three-quarters of the Q&As to be equal to or exceeding the quality of thought and insight found in any national magazine. And if Assignment Zero failed to clear the especially high bar it set for itself, the fact it produced so large a body of work still speaks to the considerable potential of crowdsourced journalism.”

Read more in the full article.

Today marks the beginning of our publishing phase at Assignment Zero.

Anyone involved in Assignment Zero will tell you it was no small endeavor. Over eighty interviews were scheduled, rescheduled, transcribed, edited and formatted.

Research, writing, re-writing, fact-checking and more have gone into our feature stories.

New friends made, lessons learned and we hope, the potential for networked journalism will shine through it all.

Today Wired has published five pieces.

1. An intro from Jay Rosen

2. Open-Source Journalism: It’s a Lot Tougher Than You Think
by Anna Haynes with additional reporting by Maurice Cardinal, Melissa Metzger, Robert William King, Francine Hardaway, and Neal G. Moore. Edited by Vivian Martin

3. Creative Crowdwriting: The Open Book Reported by: Celestina Adams, Dan Charles, Orlando Dozier, Yvonne Allison Eriksen, Jack Frost, Kristin Gorski, Gerrit Janssens, George Karimalil, Raul Larson, Gregorio Magini and Yasmin E. Voglewede
Written by: Kristin Gorski
Illustrated by: Namir Ahmed
Edited by: Michele McLellan

4. (Q&A) Your Assignment: Art
Leah DeVun interviews Andrea Grover via telephone, May 10, 2007

5. Stock Waves: Citizen Photo Journalists Are Changing the Rules
Reported by Gregg Osofsky, Nancy Feraldi, Leah DeVun, and Daniella Zalcman
Written by Daniella Zalcman
Fact-checked by Craig Silverman
Edited by Hillary Rosner

And more to come… Stay tuned.

It’s an exciting time here at NewAssignment.Net.

Although it appears quite on the main blog (that will start to change), there is a lot brewing under the surface. So here’s an update on a few fronts.

What’s Going On With Assignment Zero?

Assignment Zero has left the production phase and is entering the publishing cycle. Wired has a tight editorial calender, but they are going to publish the best content that the Assignment Zero team has produced as soon as they can.

I am one proud editor, especially when reading some of the feedback from the blogosphere. The odds were against us, and we didn’t achieve everything we wanted. But as an experiment, it was a success.

I recently was interviewed about my experience, whether it was worth putting all that time into a project where I will, more or less, see no byline.

My first and honest reaction. Of course! I am still getting emails from AZ contributors (and I’ll see more tomorrow) and I hope we continue to stay in touch — Consider me an editor for life. Getting to know the individual contributors was by far the most fulfilling part of this project.

So what is Off The Bus?

Our own Director of Participation, Amanda Michel, is going to be helping shape OffTheBuss.net, a project in network campaign journalism with the Huffington Post.

Read more about Off The Bus from Ariana Huffington herself.

This is an exciting project. Traditional campaign journalism has become an insider’s game. And that means there is a certain amount of power that a campaign reporter gets. We can’t say for certain how much that power has corrupted. But we can try to cover the campaign ourselves. As a network we can be everywhere and cover the election from all kinds of angles. I’m excited to watch this project build from the ground up.

If you are interested in joining — leave your email at the site.

What is our Director of Distributed Reporting up to?

Well, this is me, so I’ll be blunt.

1. Working with Wired on the final publishing part of AZ’s work. I’m also helping Jeff Howe from Wired research for his upcoming book on Crowdsourcing.

2. Helping Jeff Jarvis from BuzzMachine plan a conference on network journalism (more on that soon).

3. Shopping around ideas.

While I’ll be in contact with Amanda at OffTheBus.Net, I will not be involved in the day-to-day (I will miss working with her, truly one of the best working relationships I’ve ever had). I’m certainly interested in political reporting, but I’m not a fan of campaign politics — and so I leave it to much more interested and better minds (seriously though, watch out world. Having worked with Amanda closely since last October, I know how passionate/knowledgeable Amanda is about campaign politics, so I expect this project is going to become….awesome).

I have my own ideas for a networked journalism project. (I’m even talking with some AZ contributors to refine and share the ideas). It will be less techie and more culturally relevant. I’m currently looking for a news organization interested in collaborating with NewAssignment.Net on another project. If you know an organization that might be interested, contact me.

4. The NewAssignment.Net blog. I will continue to blog here about what is happening in the world of citizen journalism, collective intelligence, the changing newsroom et. al, as I find time.

Onward

So the word of the day is “onward.” Network journalism has been tested once. Now it’s time to refine the emerging art. Can network journalism tackle politics at its core? Will other news organizations take a chance by inviting their readers to help them?

Stay tuned.

Interview week at Assignment Zero is going well. Imagine it, a team of 80+ people doing 90+ interviews all for one story.

Any good journalist will tell you, you can never interview enough people for a story. But one person can only do so much.

More than that: “PressThink’s readers know more than one contributor does. So what follow-up questions do you have for SusanG? (one of the interview subjects).

Check out the post on Press Think and leave a comment if you have a follow up question to ask.

The following is an interview with the first band to successfully crowdfund their album using SellaBand. It was done by Jeff Sykes at Assignment Zero.

We’ve covered Sellaband before at NewAssignment.Net, and now that anyone can contribute to our reporting over at Assignment Zero, we are starting to get a deeper understanding of just what it means to be a SellaBand. Best of all, the reporting is all Creative Commons, you could re-use this interview to write your own story.

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Dutch rockers Nemesea were the first group to make the $50,000 mark on SellaBand. Lead singer Manda is in the studio right now recording vocal tracks, but she was kind enough to forward our questions to bandmates Sonny and Martijn. Their responses are below.

If a Martian dropped in on your recording session, how would you explain how you go the money to afford your studio time?

Sonny: Well if he had a Wi-Fi connection I’d tell him to look on Sellaband.com!

Seriously though. I’d take some time and explain what it is all about.

On www.sellaband.com bands can upload their profile (a bio, up to three songs in MP3 format, blog, show dates, photo’s and a video) The thing is to attract so-called believers to your page who are willing to invest in your band.

To get your studio time you have to find 5000 people who are willing to invest $10 (that’s what one part costs and there are 5000 in total) or 2500 who want to invest $20. Pretty obvious. For those 10 bucks they get a limited edition CD when you reach 50K and they share in the advertising revenue on your page.

A so-called regular version of your CD will also be made available.

The net profit of these sales will be equally divided between you and your Believers.

Martijn: That’s a lot of fun for $10! Five thousand people might sound like a lot, but think of how many people out there have broadband connections. By the way, you get as much CD’s as parts you’ve bought.

What attracted you to SellaBand?

Sonny:First of all. Sellaband is an amazing concept. Once you’ve created your profile and uploaded your music, blog and video’s you’re directly in contact with everyone that’s connected to the Internet. And that’s a BIG audience!

Secondly, you get to work with very professional people to make your CD once you’ve reached the 50K mark. Let’s face it. You never get to work with those kind of people unless a major label with a huge budget signs you.

And there are no strings attached. As an artist you can leave Sellaband when you want (before 50K) and the believers get their money back.

Martijn: Also Nemesea is a band which is always looking to the future. Sellaband is a new concept and we think we can make a big step forward by joining it.

What was your initial reaction to the SellaBand concept?

Over at Assignment Zero my role has shifted recently. I still handle most of the content on the back end, the site improvements that I spreadheaded are almost complete — and now I’m helping to set up other editors to take over specific topics.

I admit I’ve been slow to blog recently, apologies. Still, some of my favorite journalism bloggers somehow find time to do it every day. How, I don’t know.

Assignment Zero is still my main focus right now. But I hope to improve my blogging here by dropping little tidbits of what I learn about how, what I sometimes call "punk rock journalism.&quot, works.

These editors responsibilities as I see them are different from a traditional journalist.

How does one do journalism in a networked age?

1. Set up shop

We are inviting people to come into a mutual space and work on a project together. That space has to be spruced up first. Put a welcome mate in front of the door and make sure to have appetizers out for the early guests.

2. Outreach

The idea behind networked journalism is that other people are already interested in the topic somewhere out there in the blogosphere. Smart mobs are already organized around niche blogs, they just don’t have a platform to collaborate. Hopefully by now you’ve set up shop. Now you need to ping them and let them know. If you are covering the environment, for example, lord knows how many environmental blogs are out there, waiting for the chance to contribute their time, information, expert knowledge of a subject to a greater cause. Outreach in this sense is more than just a newsroom opening up a comment thread to their stories. It’s actively seeking out contributors.

3. Working with Participants

Easier said than done. Journalists aren’t trained to necessarily engage or collaborate with other people on a project. Just as there is a gap in the number of journalists with online skills or management skills, being a journalist doesn’t necessarily mean you know how to engage, manager or communicate with volunteers. This is actually an important and subtle talent

4. Edit the Copy

Ahhh, a sigh of relief. We haven’t gotten to this stage in Assignment Zero, so I won’t know for sure. But since the final copy is produced by one person that works with a crowd of researchers, I imagine it will be somewhat similar to traditional editing of copy.

And that’s all I have time to spew out right now. More to come eventually.

On a side note: Don’t forget to check me out at Vibe Wire’s e-Festival of ideas. I’ll be on a virtual panel with……  Dan Gillmore!!!!  For those who don’t know me — I am a huge fan of Gillmore’s — and the only downside to being on the same panel as him: I won’t be able to quote him as I often do to explain what’s going on in citizen journalism. Oh well, I guess I’ll have to come up with my own brilliant tag lines over the weekend.

Assignment Zero continues to dominate my time. But I have no intention of letting the NewAssignment.Net blog fade away. Have no fear, this will remain a place to get little tasty tidbits of information on the changing media landscape.

I’m happpy to, once again, report on another NewAssignment.Net venture. The Huffington Post project.

“Campaign reporting by a great many more people than would ever fit on the bus that the boys (and girls) of the press have famously gotten on and off every four years, as they try to cover the race for president.”

It isn’t up and running yet. But I’m happy to know that the tool which has been developed by the Assignment Zero team will soon have a new task. And by then, we would have further refined its ease of use and function.

I have confidence in this project too. It’s being spearheaded by my friend and fellow technologist Noel Hidalgo.

I’ll continue to focus on Assignment Zero — but the goal of NewAssgnment.Net was never to run just one open source media project, but to have regular investigations, ongoing updates of the tool and hopefully influence the way journalism is done in a connected world.

It’s time for an Assignment Zero meetup.

I’m in San Francisco this week! On Thursday I’m going to stop in at Wired Magazine’s office to try and drag as many people from the editorial staff as possible to a bar: 21st Amendment at 563 2nd Street San Francisco, CA 94107. I’ll be on the second floor starting at 4pm and I’ll hang around until 8pm — so there will be plenty of time to come and chat about what you want to cover for Assignment Zero, what crowdsourcing means for the future, how journalism can adapt to an evolving age and geek out in general.

As Steve Fox will surely tell you — a pub is where journalists get the real work done.

It’s amazing what can be accomplished over the Internet. But it’s even more amazing when people who collaborate over the Web meet in person to talk about how we can move forward. If you are a member of Assignment Zero or are just curious about it — please come. I’d love to chat.

Well, the first struggle is over. We’ve launched our first open source journalism project, Assignment Zero. While Lauren’s blog will be the center of communication for Assignment Zero, this blog will continue to chug along — feeding you the latest from the front of new media. How the Web is changing communication and its relationship to journalism. But since we are still fresh off our first day with Assignment Zero, let’s take a moment to highlight what other people are saying about Assignment Zero so far.

Infony: “The use of the newspaper terminology makes the underlying architecture and workflow clear to an average user. It is also important to note that Blogs were also influenced by the newspaper’s information architecture of who, when, what and where.”

Customers Rock: “Although I already consider myself a citizen journalist via blogging, I have signed up to participate in this project… I look forward to sharing ideas with a whole new crowd… I may do some research, or perhaps through this blog, we will provide some story profile information. You see, you can contribute as an individual, as part of a group, or even as a blog community.”

Joel Achenbach: “It’s a pro-am thing. It’s a bit like Wikipedia-meets-Woodward-and-Bernstein. Rosen calls it ‘distributed journalism.’”

Mashable:”Wired has teamed up with NewAssignment.Net to launch AssignmentZero, a peer produced journalism - or “citzen journalism” - project. Wired coined the term “crowdsourcing”, so if they can’t make it work, no one can. I’m skeptical about whether any of this stuff can be successful due to the headaches of managing large teams - Wikipedia broke out, but WikiNews didn’t. The project is funded by Reuters, but it’s a non-profit.”

Pajamanation: “An exciting piece in Wired News today about a project called Assignment Zero, a project that could also be called “PajamaJournalism.” We all know that some of the better bloggers out there have been correcting false news reports and factchecking the mainstream media for the last several years. But Assignment Zero is the first project we know of – with any seriousness of intention — that tries to organize itself as a sort-of open source, decentralized news service.”

Johannes Kuhn: “A few months from now we will be smarter and see whether open source-journalism works, but I have a feeling this project could very well change journalism. I do say this as a journalist myself and as somebody who believes in the possibilities of a new era of communication.”

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.