Taking On A New Assignment

One of the projects we’re most excited about at Chapter Three is called NewAssignment.Net (“NAN” for short). We’re going to run this as the premiere of our Open Practice model. If you’re interested in following or participating in this project, contact us. We’d love to hear from you.

NewAssignment.Net is an ambitious and potentially groundbreaking venture headed up by Jay Rosen, professor of Journalism at NYU and a respected presence in the blogosphere (www.pressthink.org). The goal is to develop a successful model for open-source investigative journalism.

I’m personally very excited to be working with Uncle Jay (why try and hide it: he’s related to Zack), and to be taking such a bold step into an arena — the function of the Press in a 21st Century Democracy — that’s near and dear to my own heart.

For an overview on how the project will be run, and for answers to frequent/obvious questions like “how do you prevent cranks from ruining everything?” and “are you guys just massive sell-outs?” I refer you to the horse’s mouth.

Suffice to say, I think Jay’s got what it takes to make this work:

• He’s got real experience and connections in both the old and new (print/internet) worlds of the Press.
• He has a great vision for where this can go and how it can spread, and isn’t afraid of people stealing his ideas.
• He’s willing (enthusiastic even) to run the project in a radically open fashion. How open is radical? We’re going to let you all look at our budget more or less in real-time. Oh man.

And of course last but not least he’s got the brain trust from Chapter Three LLC in his corner, which we like to think helps. It’s going to be fun.

In upcoming posts, I’ll give some back-story about the idea, and talk in-depth about some open-source and techincal aspects of how it will work, and also about our Open Practice development process.

Stay tuned to the blog here, or to the NewAssignment.net project page for updates.