Dan Gillmor took issue with one word in that description: "Harness." The word seemed limiting, he suggested.

Gillmor, author of “We, the Media” and director of the Center for Citizen Media joined Jay Rosen of NewAssignment.net and the blog PressThink and Rob Curley, V.P. of Product Development for WashingtonPost.Newsweek Interactive. J.D. Lasica moderated.

(Update 4:28 p.m. ET: The student newsroom article on this session is up online now.)

Rosen has been working with open-source journalism, including a high-profile experiment called “Assignment Zero.”

But rather than start with the most recent experiments, Rosen looked back to one of the first experiments in open-source journalism, which came from SlashDot in 1999, when staffers posted the draft of an article online to see if they could improve the article by seeking community input. They received so much input, that SlashDot editors pulled the article down and rewrote it.. “The reason this was important was because the new version of the article included the wisdom… of dozens and dozens of people, because of the Web.”

“The problem that interests me know is how do you get the knowledge, information and experience” into an article, Rosen said.

One of the most important things to look at, Rosen said, is what motivates the community. Another trick is to break projects into small pieces to allow the community to contribute as they’re able to without overwhelming them and driving them away.

But even more than motivation and breaking projects into bite-sized chunks, Rosen said, it’s important to be extremely clear about what you want people to do. “I’m not even sure there’s a word in the English language that describes how clear you have to be,” he said. 

The Rob Curley Show

I’ve seen "The Rob Curley Show," as a former co-worker termed it, several times at various conferences and meetings on top of having worked for him in Lawrence, Kan. at the Journal-World. I would happily watch The Show again – Rob is a truly nice person, he's smart and creative, and he never fails to inspire. That was true at this afternoon’s session as well, even without the 100+ slide PowerPoint presentation.

Curley’s biggest project in the year since he joined WPNI was Loudoun Extra, a site focusing on a single county in Northern Virginia. He said sometimes newspapers roll out “local” products across the entire Metro area, but washingtonpost.com went in a different direction.

“I think the key strategy decision we made was to just start in one area and work our way around and learn from what we’ve done,” he said. 

Curley said another notable thing about Loudoun Extra is that instead of the newspaper telling readers “Look at this wonderful glass we’ve build – please fill it,” the newspaper came to the community with an already-full glass. That move showed the newspaper is committed to the area, and Curley wanted to gain credibility in the community with the product before rolling out community publishing tools and asking people to contribute.  Those tools will become available in the coming weeks, he said.

Mistakes Newspapers Have Made

Opening a conversation about the mistakes newspapers have made, Gillmor implored news site publishers: “Do not charge for archives. Put a permalink on every single story you’ve done and make it available to the world. Over the years, you’ll find you become you’re the primary source on the history of your local area.”

Rosen agreed with the archives comment from Gillmor, and added other mistakes: trying to repurpose the print product on the Web, and trying to keep people on the newspaper’s site by refusing to link out. Rosen also advocated BuzzMachine blogger Jeff Jarvis’ calling: “Do what you do best, and link to the rest.”

Passion, practicality (get directions to the movie theater and compare movie reviews), entertainment or play when a person has time to kill, and pornography are the four reasons people go online, Curley said. Newspapers generally aren’t doing the “passion” part very well, except in niche products and Web sites like IndyMoms.com. (Of course, he said, newspapers don’t do “boobies” well, either. That’s a good thing.)