New Assignment Dot Net
“The site uses open source methods to develop good assignments and help bring them to completion; it employs professional journalists to carry the project home and set high standards so the work holds up,” writes Jay Rosen (via Greg Hughes). “There are accountability and reputation systems built in that should make the system reliable. The betting is that (some) people will donate to works they can see are going to be great because the open source methods allow for that glimpse ahead.”
In the comments over there, I agreed with another poster who said they couldn’t “imagine many stories will get a lot of funding at NADN if they are sharply localized.” Although it’s many months since I abandoned my own experiment in reader-funded local political journalism-by-blog, that’s still the nut I think someone’s going to have to figure out just how to crack.
Note: The original version of this post simply blockquoted the above statement from Rosen, but has been altered to its current form.