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So Jay Rosen's Assignment Zero - http://zero.newassignment.net/ - is done, did not by force of momentum turn into a huge community of citizen amateur and professional journalists, and a leader of the project openly asks if it failed. http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2007/07/assignment_zero_final

Tish Grier has a more positive take, and I respect her opinion.
http://spap-oop.blogspot.com/2007/07/assignment-zero-post-mortem.html

But I never saw the point of the project in the first place.

(Granted, I'm bitter about everyone in the save journalism field who failed to promote the hell out of New Standard. Rosen's one blog post doesn't quite do it for me.)

Why should people volunteer time and skills and ideas to pass ownership and control over to so-called professionals and Wired?

And it turns out they had trouble coordinating the number of people and making priority decisions.

Well gee, isn't that what I'm all about getting down first - http://pwgd.org - for the reason of making ultimate control democratic?

So again, absent these elements, what does this amateur-professional collaboration mean except hard-to-coordinate legwork? Can someone tell me, what was the point?