As Chartreuse chooses two volunteers to report in New Orleans, journalism guru Jay Rosen is figuring out how to build an open-source news bureau from the ground up.
All these developments make me giddy. Someday soon, I want to take my readers to Guatemala and Venezuela, chasing the kind of story I know best.
Chartreuse and Rosen are mapping out the future for us fledgling writers. I clipped Rosen's best examples of interactive journalism, but you should read the whole essay:
"Chris Allbritton, the former AP reporter who got a blog and used it to cover the war in Iraq as the United States forces descended on that country in 2003. Allbritton raised $14,500 from 342 donors on a simple promise: send back from the war original and honest reporting, free of commercial pressures, pack thinking and patriotic hype...
"On March 27, 2003 his reporting drew 23,000 users to his site, Back to Iraq. That was NewAssignment.Net in improvised form, because the journalist and a “paying” public got together and pulled it off. The people formerly known as the audience could, in a sense, hire their own journalist. Allbritton showed that it was possible; and I wrote about what he did in Columbia Journalism Review...
"Michael Yon, who is more sympathetic to the President’s aims in Iraq, has shown that Allbritton’s idea wasn’t a total fluke: he’s raised money from users to report independently from Iraq on the Net. The people who rely on Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo have funded expansions in his operation, including a Muckraking Fund that led to a new site."
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