Assignment Zero has its first article up at Wired.

It's a disappointment.

Not a bad piece of work, just as stale as week-old bread.

Citizendium v Wikipedia, Sanger v Wales...not only is the subject matter familiar, but the article does little to advance it. Lots of links, not a whole lot of original insight or reporting...more like a Wikipedia or Citizendium entry, in fact, than the next wave of journalism.

Here's Jay Rosen's progress report on the project.

Full disclosure: I advised Jay last year to take a simpler approach to collaborative pro/am journalism -- choose a newsy topic, put up a wiki with a bunch of stub pages, let anyone contribute and have the pros edit for publication, move fast and create something unique. That said, I'm rooting for Assignment Zero as configured, and expect it to change and improve over time.

[Cross-posted at Know It All]