There were many interesting topics covered at the NewBizNews HyperCamp at City University of New York yesterday. Much of the focus was on business models for a new news ecosphere where online hyper local news sites played a key role. Some of the proposed financial models for new news organizations are available online. They can be tweaked and people can explore what might really make the model work in their areas.

I have concerns about the projections about advertising revenue and what felt like a general disconnect between what I hear at online advertising conferences and what I was hearing here. I was also concerned that their focus on hyperlocal news seemed to focus on communities with a population of at least 25,000. This leaves a town like Woodbridge out of the picture, unless it is bundled with several other towns.

Yet there is much more necessary for these new models to work and one of the most important is the ability of different news organizations to work together in better collaborative models. We need to move away from the current heated rhetoric where old media and new media heavily distrust each other.

Towards the end of the day, this issue was explored in a fascinating reverse panel, “Partnerships with Local Media”. During the panel, Jeff Jarvis took comments from hyperlocal journalists about how large news organizations could work better with hyperlocal journalism. The big issues were the need for a little more respect from the large news organizations, the willingness to share links, or at least attribute hyperlocal sites; in a nutshell, a little respect and willingness to collaborate.

During this session, Jay Rosen spoke about the need for better open source tools to facilitate online assignment desks. It seemed to relate back to his New Assignment project. I’ve always been interested in the New Assignment Project. I think Jay is doing some important work there. But I’ve also always felt a little uncomfortable with it. Many bloggers, especially those with a investigative journalistic bent, have a tendency of being fiercely independent. The idea of an assignment desk is an anathema to them. They want to pursue the stories that are of interest to them. Given that many are working completely as volunteers, assignments make even less sense.

So, is there a way to take NewAssignment, and transform it into something a little more in line with how bloggers think and work instead of how old school journalists and their professors think? It would seem as if crowd sourcing the whole project might make more sense.

People would submit ideas that they think should be covered. This could be as simple as a tip line. Others could submit projects that could be done to cover these tips. These projects might be similar to ‘assignments’, but I’m avoiding what I feel is a loaded term. These projects could then seek funding through a site like spot.us if the writer needed some sort of funding to do the project. Others might choose to do the project for free. News organizations, bloggers, and independent citizen journalists alike could look at projects and see which ones they were interested in, whether or not someone else was already working on the project. This leaves a certain amount of the editorial decisions in the hands of each site. A newspaper which trusts some bloggers but not others could decide which ones to link to and projects might be covered by a blogger whose work they are not interested in.

It may be that NewAssignment is heading in this direction, especially in terms of hyperlocal news coverage. I certainly hope so. What do you think? Can decisions about what stories or events, and how to cover them be crowd sourced with an open collaborative coverage system? What else would be necessary to make such a system work better for all the players in a new news ecosphere?