instant history

Jay Rosen has a lengthy, lengthy Q&A on NewAssignment.Net, which, with some VC funds from the likes of Craig Newmark from Craiglist, hopes to create a New Media/Old Media hybrid. Who isn't these days?

The basic idea is that The Masses create and fine-tune assignments, which will eventually get voted to the front page. Once their, Angel Donors drop dollars to fund a reporter to report, using the Wiki-ized assignment sheet created by The Masses. Full-time, paid Editor/Blogger oversees all of this and pushes things along when necessary, and eventually a story is born.

It's a complicated venture, to say the least.

After the L.A. Times' hastily withdrawn wiki editorial, few imagined papers would tread that path again. But tread they did, though perhaps using the wisdom of the masses a bit more wisely to collate data rather than to form an opinion on said data.

Ben Smith's political blog, The Daily Politics, got tired of not having one regularly updated, definitive source on where various New York State Assembly members stood on gay marriage. So Smith created and spotlighted the wiki, which is available here.

So far, even with the wisdom of the collective masses, only 30 out of 150 members have been pinned down.

The vast majority of the edits appear to have been done by Smith himself.