A decade ago Tom Watson and I gave a lecture to graduate students in journalism at Columbia University. In those days Blogger wasn’t even a twinkle in Evan Williams’ eye but the Internet had already changed journalism. In the new era, we told students, everybody will be a reporter of his or her own life (so reporting will be the least important part of what paid journalists do); the line between journalists, editors, sources and readers will be erased; and any journalist can start a publication so do it!

I have no problem saying “I told you so.” In fact I’m proud of how right we were. But even we didn’t anticipate the speed with which citizen journalism would swamp professional journalism, nor how the avalanche of citizen analysis would overwhelm citizen reporting (there is simply too much undifferentiated analysis on the Net today as a daily perusal of Techmeme will make immediately apparent).

Which brings me to journalist and educator Jay Rosen and AssignmentZero , Rosen’s new experiement in pro-am journalism, a joint venture between his NewAssignment.Net and Wired News.

AssignmentZero, which launched yesterday, is designed as a 3-month attempt to connect citizen journalists with professional editors who will shape stories in advance by guiding assignments and shape stories that are published by editing packages. The assignment is a little self referential for my taste–the growth and spread of crowdsourcing.

(As Jeff Jarvis points out a big story, open ended, qualitative story of this type might be less well suited to crowdsourced journalism than NewAssignment.Net’s earlier efforts, for example tracking drug prices across the country.) Rosen and Wired seem to have different goals for the project. For Rosen it appears to be an experiment in proof of concept.

In an intro piece he asks:

Can large groups of widely scattered people, working together voluntarily on the net, report on something happening in their world right now, and by dividing the work wisely tell the story more completely, while hitting high standards in truth, accuracy and free expression?

For Wired News it seems to be a software play, as Evan Hansen, editor in chief of Wired News told lost remote :

Essentially, we’re building a software platform for journalism 2.0 — open source and extensible – which we believe will bring new dimensions of creativity to news gathering

Most of the response on the Net was positive, but Duncan Riley at 901am has a blistering response basically calling the idea a hippie pipe dream.

Will it work? Hard to say. Riley is correct in noting that collaborative, wiki-based news efforts have largely failed. And one might wonder if central editorial control of crowdsourced information is really necessary. Doesn’t citizen journalism work because the community of users functions as an editorial board? Isn’t the most radical change wrought by citizen journalism the impact of citizen consensus on perceptions of truth, accuracy and free expression?

But if you’re interested you can ask these questions and more of Rosen himself. Rosen will be the featured guest at the next meeting of the Social Media Club New York chapter, Tuesday, March 27, at 6 pm at the offices of Edelman Public Relations, 1500 Broadway at 43rd Street. RSVP here.