First Assignment for NetAssignment.Net: Who Are the Stringers?

What would happen if the world’s experts and those with personal knowledge of something newsworthy gathered together online to provide the depth journalism so often lacking in major media? Jay Rosen’s post announces the $100,000 seed funding from Reuters of NetAssignment.Net, “where people collaborate peer-to-peer in the production of editorial goods.”

The idea is to draw “smart crowds”—groups of people configured to share intelligence—into collaboration at NewAssignment.Net and get stories done that way that aren’t getting done now. By pooling their intelligence and dividing up the work, a network of volunteer users can find things out that the larger public needs to know. I think that’s most likely to happen in collaboration with editors and reporters who are paid to meet deadines, and to set a consistent standard. Which is the “pro-am” part.

I propose the first project to be the detailing of the backgrounds of the thousands of stringers employed by the major media around the world. There are, at least, three fundamental questions to be answered: Is the world’s media being manipulated, by whom, and how much?

The latest case is of the Associated Press’ photographer in Iraq, whose product is either characterized as propaganda photos or behind the lines photos, and who was caught with an Al-Quaeda leader in an apartment with bomb-making materials and traces of explosives on his clothes. (See here for the AP’s take, and here, here, and here for its fisking.)

This is not a new issue. Pham Xuan An died at 79 yesterday. He was the prized stringer during the Vietnam war of Western news services, who turned out to be a Viet Cong officer.

The major news wire services, newspapers and TV have not been forthcoming about the details of who the stringers are that they hire, how they’re vetted, or the verification of their reporting. If the media wants us to trust them and their word on the issues of – literally -- life and death for Americans and other nations’ peoples, aren’t we entitled to know whose word we’re supposed to trust?