A new dimension to a news story

First there were bloggers changing the face of the way our news is reported to us, let alone how we "receive" it. Now a new dimension to the reporting news emerges from this piece in the NY Times. Newspapers may well become nothing more than wrapping-paper for fish and chips if things don't look up for those regular newspapers we are all used to.

"Journalism has always been a product of networks. A reporter receives an assignment, begins calling “sources” — people he or she knows or can find. More calls follow and, with luck and a deadline looming, the reporter will gain enough mastery of the topic to sit down at a keyboard and tell the world a story.

A new experiment wants to broaden the network to include readers and their sources. Assignment Zero (zero.newassignment.net/), a collaboration between Wired magazine and NewAssignment.Net, the experimental journalism site established by Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University, intends to use not only the wisdom of the crowd, but their combined reporting efforts — an approach that has come to be called “crowdsourcing.”

The idea is to apply to journalism the same open-source model of Web-enabled collaboration that produced the operating system Linux, the Web browser Mozilla and the online encyclopedia Wikipedia."

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Mahler's Prodigal Son

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