Chris Ahearn, President of Reuters Media, posts this intriguing bit at
Huffington today. Reuters is throwing $100k behind a project supporting a media by and for the people. I hope the transformation of the media is about to speed up. Money quotes below the fold.
Maybe Ahearn is as sickened as we are by the lapdog media and the blizzard of Brangelina and the blonde girl du jour stories.
The project, brainchild of NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen, seeks to build a collaborative journalism putting the power of the informed and/or Googling public together with established media people and their access to outlets and figures. But I'll let Rosen explain:
Jay's novel program will seek to spark innovative investigative journalism by inviting the public to have a more active role in reporting. Our hope is that MewAssignment.Net will engage the public and journalists to pursue hard-hitting, investigative pieces that otherwise might not see the light of day. Through the MewAssignment.Net website, the public will be invited to suggest and assign stories, donate money to support reporting and help in gathering facts.
Professionals and amateurs will cooperate to produce work that neither could manage alone, using "open source" methods to develop assignments and help bring them to completion. The idea is that people will contribute to stories that they believe will make a difference.
I'm optimistic--wouldn't it be great if this thing really took off and we could transform newscasts and newspapers as we would like? Kind of a "Fantasy Executive Editor" thing. My first suggested story would be a microscopic look at Pakistan and the facts raised in DarkSyde's scary scary front page post a couple of days back.
Ahearn continues:
While encouraging good journalistic ideas is a worthy goal in itself, Reuters believes that supporting new and varied networks of creators with different perspectives is good for both journalism and business.
Ultimately, journalism is about the story and the pursuit of truth; it is not about the news industry, a j-school or a traditional newsroom structure. By building bridges and finding new ways to augment and accelerate the creation of quality journalism, we believe that ultimately the public will benefit and perhaps change their minds about the noble profession of journalism.
C'mon Kossacks! We have the brainpower here to make ePluribus Media viral, and now there's some mainstream money and cred behind the general movement. Whaddaya say?