Reuters Announces $100,000 Grant for NewAssignment.net

By: E&P Staff Reuters has announced a new $100,000 grant that will help fund a groundbreaking new journalism project being spearheaded by New York University professor Jay Rosen.

The project, NewAssignment.net, which will launch next spring, aims to increase the public's role in investigative reporting and in the way news is gathered. The site will allow people to share information with one another at minimal cost, while readers from around the world will be invited to suggest assignments to professional reporters, donate money to support this reporting, and help gathering facts for the project.

"Whether the gift economy can support original reporting on the Web is not clearly known," writes Rosen on his blog PressThink. "But it?s worth a try at a time when the market economy is forcing newspapers to cut staff and bring expenses in line with falling revenues." Rosen says he hopes that the site will allow professional journalists and ordinary citizens to collaborate and produce work that neither would have been able to do alone.

The Reuters grant, which is the largest amount the project has received so far, will allow NewAssignment.net to hire a full-time editor starting in early 2007.

"Jay's novel program will seek to spark innovative investigative journalism by inviting the public to have a more active role in reporting," wrote Chris Ahearn, President of Reuters Media on HuffingtonPost.com. "Our hope is that NewAssignment.Net will engage the public *and journalists* to pursue hard-hitting, investigative pieces that otherwise might not see the light of day. Through the NewAssignment.Net website, the public will be invited to suggest and assign stories, donate money to support reporting and help in gathering facts."

Rosen has said that the setup of the site will give it the ability to do the stories that mainstream news outlets are unlikely or unwilling to do. As more people become interested in a developing story, it's thought that more will be inclined to contribute their reporting or money to help the story continue to build.

"One of outstanding facts of the Net era is that the costs for like-minded people to find each other and work together are falling rapidly," writes Rosen. "Someone has to figure out what the consequences of that fact are for original reportage. This is what NewAssignment plans to experiment with."

Reuters says it will have no editorial control over the site's projects, and it will not hold right of first refusal for any of the stories that the site is covering. Craig's List founder Craig Newmark and the Sunlight foundation have also each donated $10,000 to the project.