Jay Rosen, over at Press Think - Ghost of democracy in the media machine is proposing a hybrid form of professional and citizen media. And Craig Newmark of Craigslist is offering $10k from his foundation to test the idea.

In simplest terms, a way to fund high-quality, original reporting, in any medium, through donations to a non-profit called NewAssignment.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. 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 this sense it’s not like donating to your local NPR station, because your local NPR station says, “thank you very much, our professionals will take it from here.” And they do that very well. New Assignment says: here’s the story so far. We’ve collected a lot of good information. Add your knowledge and make it better. Add money and make it happen. Work with us if you know things we don’t.

There is more about this on the site, tons and tons more. I think this approach would work only for select stories that would benefit from a large number of people helping in researching the story.

This is not a solution for creating news on a daily, hourly, minute schedule. This is overly complex, it is news editing by committee, and the funders will likely always have agendas.

Also, the business model issue is not addressed.

Craig Newmark's support for this project is interesting. I'm a big fan of Mr Newmark and regularly bump into him at events in San Francisco but I'm puzzled why he often appears as a commentator on the topics of mainstream media and citizens journalism. As far as I know, he appears to have no special credentials or expertise to comment on these topics, anymore than anyone.

Mr Newmark is a software engineer and his site, Craigslist, is an excellent online classified ads site without the journalism. How does this make him into an expert on "the media?" He is certainly an expert on classified ads.