The website for the experiment in open-source reporting, NewAssignment.net, is now live. This is a soft launch, with the site starting off with blogs discussing networked reporting projects. New Assignment.Net is intended to produce high-quality journalism by bringing a way to bring together professional journalists and large groups of users. It is part of the trend towards crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is a term coined by Wired magazine writer Jeff Howe and

Big changes announced by USA Today publisher Gannett. It is doing away with newsrooms to create what it calls “information centers”. Romenesko has posted a memo from Gannett CEO Craig Dubnow announcing the shift in its news operations. “The Information Center, frankly, is the newsroom of the future. It will fulfill today’s needs for a more flexible, broader-based approach to the information gathering process. And it will be platform agnostic:

Here is a scary statistic for you. Americans spend an average of 1.37 minutes a day visiting newspaper websites, according to figures released by the Newspaper Association of America (NAA). That compares to the situation four years ago, when the average reader of an US print newspaper devoted 20 minutes to reading it. The 1.37 minutes is an average number, so some of the 58 million Americans who visit online

Here’s some advice for budding journalists looking to launch their careers in online newsrooms – learn the basics, reports Poynter Online. According to a survey by the Online News Association, traditional skills such as news judgement, grammar and style, and ability to work under time pressure are key in online newsrooms. But what the study also shows is that student journalists must also adopt a multimedia mindset. From the report:

The popularity of Wikipedia has got everyone excited about the idea of wikis, a web page that can be written or edited by anyone. PBS’s Mark Glaser has written a clear guide to wikis on his Mediashift blog. It is a good introduction to wikis, Wikipedia and the use of the tool by news organisations and businesses

News items on website go through various edits, as they are updated throughout the day and new information is added and other details dropped. But now a site called News Sniffer is tracking these changes, with the stated aim of monitoring “corporate news organisations to uncover bias”. NewsSniffer monitors BBC News and UK newspapers, The Independent and Guardian Unlimited. It checks for changes to stories and highlights the differences in