Paul's Web Space 2.1

BeatBlogging.org Launches; EdWeeek Reporter Participating

Jay Rosen has just launched BeatBlogging.org, the third project undertaken by his organization NewAssignment.Net, as an experiment to test the concept of “beat reporting with a social network.” I saw Jay present this concept a few weeks ago at the Online News Association Annual Conference in Toronto. After hearing his presentation, edweek.org inquired about taking part in the project; as a result, Michelle Davis from Education Week's Digital Directions will be one of thirteen journalists taking part (so far).

NewAssignment.Net has undertaken two other projects in sixteen months:

• Assignment Zero, a partially-successful attempt to employ citizen journalists^* to cover the story and history of crowdsourcing, in partnership with Wired.com. Assignment Zero took a little while to gel, to organize the unexpected infusion of volunteer reporters and editors, but it ended up producing a handful of excellent stories and dozens of high quality interviews.


• OffTheBus, a collaboration with the Huffington Post to organize citizen journalists to report stories not being covered by the conventional media (those who ride "on the bus"). It appears to be very active, publishing several pieces daily, ranging from blog entries to larger collaborative journalism projects, news stories, and interviews. Arianna Huffington and Zack Exley have already described the project better than I ever could; read also the first project assignment.
  

Jay announced BeatBlogging.org on November 14, posting identical entries on his blog Pressthink and on IdeaLab, the blog set up for winners of the most recent Knight News Challenge, which is funding the project. He postulated:

Maybe a beat reporter could do a way better job if there was a “live” social network connected to the beat, made up of people who know the territory the beat covers, and want the reporting on that beat to be better.

Education Week's Digital Directions is taking part in BeatBlogging.org alongside such news organizations as Houston Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, ESPN.com, MTV News, and Chronicle of Higher Education. I look forward to watching the adventure unfold. We are currently expanding the online presence of Digital Directions – a relatively new publication – and this effort should mesh well with other social media initiatives currently underway at edweek.org.

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^* Some news professionals don't like the term "citizen journalism," preferring "citizen media" or something similar. They believe that real journalism is practiced by trained professionals, according to strict standards — a description that they claim doesn't always fit the crowdsourced alternative. I'm undecided on the issue, and at any rate, "citizen journalism" is the term employed by NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen to describe the various projects that make up NewAssignment.Net; I'll defer to the mastermind.

   Link: http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2007/11/14/beat_reps.html

¶ 11:34 PM | Permalink | |
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