Check it out: Assignment Zero

Assignment Zero is about both citizen journalism and crowdsourcing, and with today's launch they will be taking their first experimental steps on the road to determining how the two can collide.  What can a collective group of journalists do that a solitary one cannot?  A project from NewAssignment.net and Wired, Assignment Zero welcomes you to join the newsroom, encourages you to develop their stories, and provides you the interactive tools and infrastructure to work with them and other citizen journalists.

"We don't know yet how well our site and our methods work. Our ideas are crude because they are untested. By participating, you can help us figure this puzzle out," writes Jay Rosen, NewAssignment.net's founder.  But, he continues, Assignment Zero's strengths counter identified weaknesses in traditional journalistic models.  "A professional newsroom can't easily do this kind of reporting; it's a closed system. Because only the employees operate in it, there can be reliable controls...The weakness is the organization only knows what its own people know. Which wasn't much of a weakness until the Internet made it possible for the people formerly known as the audience to realize their informational strengths."

You can join the web of efforts over at Assignment Zero.