Experimenting with the citizens

A website which has decided to test out the inevitable rise of citizen journalism is Newassignment. This website which, ironically enough, was born of a blog post, aims to establish the merits of open-source journalism in collaboration with various news partners.

Newassignment sets out its stall and declares that it wants to:

“Spark innovation in “open platform” journalism, distributed reporting and what’s now called crowdsourcing. These are forms made possible by the Web and by the falling costs for large numbers of people to locate each other, share information, and collaborate across distance.”

It does this in collaboration with online news providers such as Wired, The Huffington Post and ESPN.com. The creator of the website, Jay Rosen, is attempting to see how well a hybrid of amateur and professionalism journalism works through various experiments.