Jay Rosen Wants Your Story Ideas Now
Jay Rosen continues to move forward with NewAssignment.net, his cooperative professional/amateur nonprofit news gathering enterprise. He has even set up a site for it. But first over at PressThink he has offered a challenge which I am copying below and at the end of which is the idea I am sending him, where are your ideas?
Here is Rosen:
I need PressThink readers to help me out by thinking about stories that would be right for a New Assignment test run later this fall. By “right” for a NewAssignment.Net test I mean something that:
- is under-covered, poorly covered or not covered at all by the major news media;
- lends itself to “distributed reporting,” where a bunch of people-dispersed but connected by the Net-could contribute knowledge in a manner that would be hard for a reporter or even two or three to duplicate;
- is a story of national, international or regional importance- newsworthy, in other words;
- is doable in about six weeks time;
It’s the second bullet, the lends itself to “distributed reporting” part that seems to be the trickiest. Many readers of my blog and a good number who wrote to me after the first wave of publicity for New Assignment suggested stories that were under-covered and possibly newsworthy, but had no distributed reporting dimension to them at all.
In my introduction I used the example of prescription drug pricing, which was originally Gillmor’s idea. A network of users tells us what a critically important drug costs all over the U.S. (or the world for that matter.) Another suggestion I got (from Amy Gahran) was “having thousands of eyes on the chemical-transport-by-rail safety issue, a huge hole in the whole homeland security thing.” Not bad.
What are your ideas for a good test story?
So okay, Jay here is my idea:
Who Will We Kill –And Must We?
Governments always work to demonize would-be enemies. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution did a great job this weekend of introducing us to the real people in Iran via photos. Do we really want to destroy their lives? Or can we find a way to work with them in people-to-people conversations? Can we seek ways to develop relations rather than building master plans to destroy each other? I would want your professionals to examine that idea and see if it has legs. I want some hard-nosed journalism because I don’t want to be duped by Iranian powerbrokers nor do I want to be a duped by our own powerbrokers. I would want it to be distributive in that citizens with connections to Iran would help to deliver real people stories from Iran. Lots of them. Let’s first get to know them and then have all these citizens as well as our own speak to each other as civilized human beings. Let’s not make it episodic. Let’s have continuing stories that search for ways to find people-to-people peaceful solutions rather just sitting back while governments put all of our lives, hopes and dreams at risk.
