Hey Scoop: you want to be a reporter? Then start reporting.

New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen’s Newassignment.net project started its Assignment Zero project on Wednesday. It is an experiment that, as Joel Achenbach writes on his Achenblog site on washingtonpost.com, allows anyone to cover the news in conjunction with professional journalists.

Steve Fox, who’s working on the project, blogs about it on the Assignment Zero Web page: “Assignment Zero will use the crowd to do much of the traditional legwork needed to do go reporting… The crowd will be assisted by professional editors and the final product will run on Wired, New Assignment and elsewhere on the Web. The theory is that by using a large pool of reporters, you get more sourcing, more anecdotes, better reporting, and ultimately, a better story.” (Full disclosure: I worked with Steve at washingtonpost.com. Full disclosure 2: Reuters is one of Newassignment.net’s backers)

Achenbach asked Rosen the tough questions: what about blowhards and what about bad information? Hopefully blowhards will be too bored to participate, while the project also will enlist a “director of verification.”

Assignment Zero’s first story relies on the old dictum of writing about what you know: the spread of “crowdsourcing,” or the kind of journalism that Assignment Zero practices. On the site are ways to get involved, an assignment desk, an ethics guide for budding journos and a basic guide to journalism.

(The above photo is of Miami Herald staffers celebrating a Pulitzer Prize win. Will crowdsource reporting ever lead to something like this? Let us know what you think.)