|
|
March 27, 2007
Participate in Politics by Covering the Campaign: NewAssignment.Net and Huffington Post Team UpMore eyes and ears, more voices, and more people with more sources of information, more experts with more specialties, more writers on more beats, some of them quite offbeat...Arianna Huffington and I are announcing today a new joint venture in campaign journalism. It will be a partnership between NewAssignment.Net, my experimental site for “pro-am” reporting, and the Huffington Post, where I have been an occasional contributor. Our idea is not complicated: it’s campaign reporting by a great many more people than would ever fit on the bus that the boys (and girls) of the press have famously gotten on and off every four years, as they try to cover the race for president. So instead of one well-placed reporter trailing John Edwards wherever he goes (which is one way of doing it) some 40 or 50 differently-placed people tracking different parts of the Edwards campaign, all with peculiar beats and personal blogs linked together by virtue of having a common editor and a page through which the best and most original stuff filters out to the greater readership of the Web, especially via the Huffington Post. This was the idea I sketched for Arianna and her editorial team. “And we should do it for multiple candidates,” I said. I left it to them to decide how far down the probability scale we would reach. Arianna’s announcement post from today has most of the details you’ll need. “We’ll have a Clinton blog, an Obama blog, an Edwards blog, a McCain blog, a Giuliani blog, a Romney blog, a Biden blog, a Richardson blog, a Dodd blog, a Kucinich blog, a Brownback blog, a Huckabee blog,” she writes. “The larger campaigns could have 50 to 100 or more people following them.” The group blogs will also feature a compendium of the merely useful information about each candidate, including latest speeches, upcoming appearances, new videos out, the official and unofficial ads, news coverage of course, and oddities like an organizational chart. Sometime this spring, then, we’ll roll out twelve new pages at NewAssignment.Net with a mix of news, information, original reporting and views not-found-elsewhere. Behind each candidate page will be a contributors’ network built by hand, made up of people who would like to participate in the 2008 election by claiming a campaign beat and making their own news and commentary, in collaboration with others doing the same thing (but coming from a different place.) All overseen by an editor paid to make the whole thing run, and evaluated by how good the twelve pages are. In our current plan, the new sites will be co-branded by the Huffington Post, but they will live at a section of our site, which is how Assignment Zero, our current project with Wired.com, works. (Read David Carr’s column about it in the New York Times.) So there’s a structure, and for the contributors substantial freedom within that structure. Some order, some chaos. There are editors filtering, but contributors post what they want at their own mini-blogs. We don’t pay you for your time if you choose to become one of our contributors. Neither do we own your work. A Creative Commons license will apply to it. There will be no ads at the NewAssignment.Net site, which is non-profit. The Huffington Post, which does have ads, will have the right to pull content from our 12 candidate pages. The Huffington Post is going to cover the 2008 campaign in a variety of ways. It’s been hiring reporters to do original digging. It will have the normal range of contributors doing commentary for the HP blog. It will do quick investigations. And it will try the strength-in-numbers approach with NewAssignment.Net. After Matter: Notes, reactions & links… If you’d like to be involved as a contributor, read Arianna’s post, then send your name, contact info, and which campaign you may want to follow to campaigntrail@huffingtonpost.com More background: I did a guest post about the project at Mark Glaser’s Media Shift site: Escaping the Bubble in Campaign Journalism. (March 29) For each candidate, we’ll have lots of correspondents outside the bubble tracking parts of the campaign that touch their own interests, or tap their own knowledge. Instead of hundreds of reporters on the bus, all doing the same beat, we’ll have hundreds of different beats (and melodies) coming not from the campaign trail but from different places in the United States where politics is part of life, and the presidential campaign “lands” on people every four years, as if from above. Danny Glover at National Journal’s Beltway Blogger: An Online Revolution In Campaign Coverage. “Coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign will be nothing like coverage of the past if bloggers Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post and Jay Rosen of NewAssignment.Net have their way…” Frank Barnako at Marketwatch.com: Huffington, NewAssignment.Net plan swarming campaign coverage. It will be especially interesting to see how long these volunteers will stay on duty. If you’ve ever been on a campaign trail, you know how hectic and tiring - and ultimately boring - it can be to cover one candidate. Without a bi-weekly incentive, like a paycheck, it can be doubly challenging. Ellen Miller at the Sunlight Foundation site takes notice: “I can’t help but wonder how we might apply this concept to some key Congressional campaigns in 2008.” I hope that Jay and Arianna’s efforts will help people find their voice in the political discourse. However, I worry that it might be the same rich white ivy school educated young men that I run into on the blogs and the conferences across our country. I worry that the discourse might end up being not substantially different from the nasty, horse race, Coke or Pepsi type coverage that we see in the traditional mainstream media. We’re going to try not to do that, Aldon, because that would be unfortunate, boring and dumb. Over at PJNet, Len Witt interviews me about Assignment Zero and how it’s going so far. Excerpt… Witt: Given the magnitude of the project and doing things on the fly, what’s the mood of your shop? How does it square with, shall we say, your feisty personality? Last summer I wrote The People Formerly Known as the Audience. It got around. Apparently leading to this: The People formerly known as The Congregation.
Posted by Jay Rosen at March 27, 2007 2:09 AM
Comments
Wow - this one's really going to be an adventure. One feature that'd be cool would be a "what should we ask [candidate]" section, for everyone to submit questions. A caveat, to belabor the obvious - the project needs an excellent immune system, to protect against (or at least identify) campaign-affiliated infiltrators/stooges. Surowiecki's "independent" reqt won't be met, if the most active participants are secretly mouthpieces. And if they browbeat the editors into featuring their work. Food for thought - what would such an immune system look like? Posted by: Anna Haynes at March 27, 2007 10:48 AM | Permalink I agree with Ellen Miller that this should be extended to local campaigns and not just at the congressional level. It is important to have more and better coverage of the campaign for president - especially of the issues instead of the horserace. But it is just as important to cover the local races that get undercovered (particularly on tv news, but even at newspapers far too often). These offices and ballot propositions can be just as important to people's lives, and good coverage could have an even bigger impact to educate people and increase participation and voting. Perhaps you could team up with local media organizations or non-profits. It may not be possible to do this in every community in 2008, but some pilot projects in 2008 could lead to far more coverage in 2010. Also, for the Huffington Post project, I'd imagine some people will cover a city or region more than a specific campaign. For example when McCain, Clinton, Obama, Guilliana, etc come to San Francisco. One thing that would help is better public access to the candidate's schedules. The Edwards website listed a public politicy speech in San Francisco on Monday, but no details. Then even that was removed. If I had known the location, I would have gone. Posted by: Steve Rhodes at March 27, 2007 2:05 PM | Permalink What's newassignment.net? Posted by: political forum at March 28, 2007 5:57 PM | Permalink That's what the link is the first paragraph is for. If you had clicked it, you would have found a welcome page that starts with your question. It reads... What is NewAssignment.Net? New Assignment.Net is a non-profit site that tries to spark innovation in journalism by showing that open collaboration over the Internet among reporters, editors and large groups of users can produce high-quality work that serves the public interest, holds up under scrutiny, and builds trust. A second aim is to figure out how to fund this work through a combination of online donations, micro-payments, traditional fundraising, syndication rights, sponsorships, advertising and any other method that does not compromise the site�s independence or reputation. At New Assignment, pros and amateurs cooperate to produce work that neither could manage alone. The site uses open source methods to develop good assignments and help bring them to completion. It pays professional journalists to carry the project home and set high standards; they work closely with users who have something to contribute. Another way to say what it is... Go see Assignment Zero and read about it. Wow. With the Huffington Post no less! No liberal bias to see here, folks. Move along. Move along. Seriously - do you want to sully the approach so early out of the gate by associating with Huffpo? Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at April 5, 2007 12:08 PM | Permalink |
|
Print
