I've been following this NewAssignment.Net thing, but Jay writes too damn much to point to any one piece he does on it for someone else to read (not that I read it all). This interview with /. goes all over the place, its not just about NA.net, and talks about some pretty interesting things in reporting (and is fairly readable because he is talking down to /., not to his academia buddies).

Create more writers and suddenly you may need more editors. “The conversation feeds journalism, journalism feeds the conversation” is a powerful idea, but we are several steps away from knowing how it works to create a live, intelligent filter in the newsroom.

The normal tensions with the press were driven deeper: keep them back, keep them out, tell them nothing, tear them down. If someone does break a story from inside you immediately punish and isolate anyone who spoke to the reporter. You make them disown their words. You make them repent.

This is the story Woodward missed because he got inside it, so to speak. Ron Suskind, one of the few in Washington who did not miss that story, called it "the retreat from empiricism." To me, it's the big narrative yet to come out about the Bush White House. Attack Without a Plan was too crazy to be credible to Woodward. So he wrote Plan of Attack instead.

Read more at PressThink.