WIRED chose Drupal for Assignment Zero, a pro-amateur hybrid journalism experiment

Seen this? Of course you have... Wired has chosen Drupal for its new and exciting AssignmentZero 'pro-am journalism' site. This relates to our newsing efforts I think. GNN.tv is another site that tries to promote journalistic development of its users.

http://www.wired.com/news/culture/media/0,72974-0.html?tw=wn_culture_2
http://zero.newassignment.net/

From the Wired News story:

This is not just another wiki. Assignment Zero is a new kind of website, one of the first of its kind tailored specifically to supporting a distributed newsgathering team.

The site was built on open-source collaboration software Drupal and the code has been freely licensed under GNU General Public License. All of the work product will be licensed under a Creative Commons copyright.

The result is a new architecture for what Rosen calls pro-am journalism, a hybrid approach in which the pros help direct the amateurs. (See Rosen's letter to participants.) Think of the pros as Sherpas, and yourself as our client. We'll guide you, but only to the destinations of your choice.

"A lot of what's called citizen journalism involves people commenting on stories that have already been completed," says Amanda Michel, Assignment Zero's director of participation. "The idea with AZ is to bring them into the beginning of the process. We're letting them step into the newsroom and participate in every aspect of the work flow."