Earlier this month, Wired Magazine published the results of Assignment Zero, a pro-am journalism experiment that started earlier this year.
According to the Wired Magazine article announcing the project in March:
"This project offers any willing contributor the chance to do the work of a reporter, writer, researcher or editor in a joint investigation by Wired and NewAssignment.Net. When Assignment Zero ends, NewAssignment.Net will publish the results -- articles, interviews and assorted data. … When the project concludes in two to three months, we hope to have produced the most comprehensive knowledge base to date on the scope, limits and best practices of crowdsourcing. …The subject is the crowd itself -- its wisdom, creativity, power and potential." Wired worked with journalist/blogger Jay Rosen and his NewAssignment.net network on the project.
The results: Numerous feature articles and more than 80 interviews.
So, Wired’s Jeff Howe asked in an essay earlier this week, "Did Assignment Zero fail?"
Well, yes. And, more importantly, no. Howe wrote Assignment Zero was a “highly satisfying,” educational, discovery-packed, partial failure.
"Citizen media initiatives are a hot topic in the media, and the new project, christened Assignment Zero, was widely reported. The New York Times gave it a lengthy, if skeptical, treatment. Would the crowd prove too tough to manage, the reporter asked?
Six months later, the jury is in, and the answer is mostly yes," Howe wrote. "Although Assignment Zero produced a strong body of work, consisting of seven original essays and some 80 Q&As, the real value of the exercise was discovery. We learned a lot about how crowds come together, and what's required to organize them well. But many of the lessons came too late to help Assignment Zero."
The problems were, Howe reported, general confusion, disorganization, technical "glitches" – you name it, it went wrong.
"I wouldn't say it's easy for widely scattered people working together voluntarily on the net to report on a big story unfolding in many places at once," Rosen wrote in the introduction to the Assignment Zero results. "But we know a lot more about it now than we did when we started, and one of the goals of Assignment Zero was to test whether pro-am methods had potential. I think they do, but we haven't really unlocked it yet. We are, however, getting closer."
The Assignment Zero project has many lessons in it for any newspaper or other journalism organizations considering ways to include its community. The project’s challenges underscored the importance of organization and planning (including making a lot of back-up plans) when dealing with a crowd-source or citizen-contribution project.
But I’d like to emphasize one key phrase in Rosen’s conclusion:
“We know a lot more about it now than we did when we started.”
Most journalism organizations focus on success solely in terms of Web site traffic numbers, revenue, readers. Those are all measurable items that provide numerical validation that a project is a "success."
More journalism organizations should balance the need for projects to (measurably) succeed (yes, we need readers and revenue) with the benefits of editors growing and learning by successfully failing.
As Reportr blogger Alfred Hermida wrote, "The lesson here for journalism is not so much whether crowdsourcing works, but that failure is not something to be scared [of]. For journalism to thrive in the future there is a need for more experimentation, more failure, and ultimately, more successes."