Media Takes: Giving the 'smart mob' a voice in the media
Jay Rosen has spent 20 years teaching journalism at New York University. He's written a well-received book on civic journalism –What Are Journalists For?– and even hosted a New York City radio show for a spell.
But for the past three years on his blog PressThink, the Buffalo native seems to have found his real métier: He has emerged as not only one of the nation's most provocative press critics but also a relentless advocate for wresting some control of journalism from the professional media and putting it in the hands of the engaged, online public, the folks he calls the "smart mob."
And now he has an audacious – some say doomed – plan to do just that: Rosen announced Tuesday on his blog that with $10,000 from Craig Newmark (the man whose online Craigslist free-ad empire has decimated the paid classified pages of newspapers across the country), he will launch an online investigative journalism venture that will turn to its readers for both ideas and funding.
It's a compelling concept: Rosen wants to solicit that so-called smart mob for ideas for stories the traditional news media "doesn't do, can't do, wouldn't do, or already screwed up," his 12-page manifesto says. And once users and bloggers and other potential donors are invested intellectually and emotionally in the story, he wants them to pony up the dough to hire reporters and editors to carry out the project – with continued input and, potentially, reporting assistance from the mob.
Rosen on Tuesday told me that reaction to the venture has been "pretty much what I expected – some people immediately think of all the problems with this, why it won't work. Other people are interested in how it does work."
The broadest criticisms have centered around control big donors may seek to exert on story selection and content, the potential for donors demanding money back if a story doesn't reach a conclusion they support, and the outsize influence that may be wielded by wealthier, older Americans who have more access and time to spend on the web.
Rosen acknowledges all of those concerns. But the venture – expected to be online this fall with an eye toward potentially choosing, funding, and producing a story that bears on the 2008 presidential election – is an experiment, he says, designed to begin to answer the question of whether the economies of scale of online participation can be put to solid journalistic use.
"How do we do that," he says, "and what are the problems?"
Rosen wrote his online manifesto about the project he's calling NewAssignment.Net in a question-and-answer form, and we thought we'd ask Rosen to weigh in on with us in similar fashion.
On whether the venture will compete with traditional media.
We're not trying to be a comprehensive news source. We're not your objective news source or anything like that. You would not rely on us to understand the United States. We're not claiming to monitor the world here. We would be a niche or boutique producer that would from time to time do something different and hopefully extraordinary, if it works.
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