I was asked to go on the show because of a post I wrote about the Gazette’s new hyperlocal/citizen journalism site, and because of my previous involvement with NewsAssignment.net. It was an interesting discussion, and we were given a decent amount of time to talk. Still, as Stephen said to us at the end of the taping, we could have gone on much longer. Give a listen tomorrow and let me know what you think.

Since this project launched I’ve always said, even if we don’t improve the quality of news (which I hope we do), we re-engage citizens in the news process and this is a benefit to democracy. Democracy rests its fate on engaged citizens – people who consume the news but also go out and make news happen.

The emphasis we put on Pro-Am is about re-engaging people into the news process, so they are introduced to concepts and aspects of our society that they can continue to pursue after the reporting is done. That’s how you create a strong democracy.

In the past news organizations would show people problems in our society in the hopes of spurring action. In truth, however, we probably lost their attention in the first 10 minutes. But instead of showing people, the Pro-Am model engages people. It asks them to tell news organizations what they see, think and feel. That is a call to action and the hope is that it is one that continues after the reporting.

Society as a whole wins when people are encouraged to participate in the news process and are given the means to do so. I tend to focus on how we can get people to take more of a role in detecting and correcting errors, but my micro approach only serves to illustrate that there are so many different ways to bring the public into the news process.

This open-source experiment by NewAssignment.net and Wired News sought to harness the collective expertise of members of the public under the guidance of professional journalists. "It pushed outside the box in terms of service to the field," the judges said.

TechPresident.com earned the $10,000 grand prize.

…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 be pulled together and
written by Wired’s Jeff Howe.

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