Some big news today for OffTheBus.Net, the joint venture in campaign journalism I have undertaken with Arianna Huffington and the Huffington Post.
Project Director, and the one responsible for day-to-day management, will be Amanda Michel, most recently Director of Participation for Assignment Zero (a joint venture with Wired.com.) She worked for the Dean and then the Kerry-Edwards campaign in 2004.
Joining her will be Zack Exley, who was Director of Online Organizing and Communications for the Kerry-Edwards campaign in 2004. He directed the online campaign for the British Labor Party's 2005 re-election. Before that he worked for MoveOn.org and before that he was a union organizer. He will serve as Senior Adviser and traveling correspondent for OffTheBus, reporting from overlooked vantage points on the campaign trail. (See the Press Release for more.)
Michel and Exley have worked together before. They were both sent to Ohio in 2004 when Amanda was on the Kerry campaign's Internet team. They are co-founders (with others) of the New Organizing Institute, which trains young techies and political organizers in the essentials of the online world.
"Of all the people we talked to and interviewed for this project, Zack and Amanda were the ones who really understood what we are trying to accomplish," says Arianna in her post today.
Indeed, they convinced me to modify my original plan and turn OffTheBus into a more open blogging platform, where anyone can sign up and get a blog on our system by filling out a profile and meeting some simple disclosure requirements.
Zack Exley at his post today, Time to get off the bus:
When thousands of us get together to investigate how the campaigns are operating in all of our communities, we can piece together a moving picture of American politics that's more complete than anything the mainstream news has ever been able to consider.
The design we're planning to go with for our mid-July launch (subject to change, of course) features...
* Open blogging platform with a filter-to-the-front-page system for culling the best stuff;
* Page editors (starting with one front page) who mix the best blog posts with headlines from campaign '08 and incoming video and audio.
* A free-floating corps of OffTheBus bloggers, some of whom may wish to track particular candidates, or develop specialties and beats, though there is no requirement that they do so.
* A larger pool of participants (the OffTheBus contact list) who are willing and able to collaborate in occasional acts of distributed reporting; they may or may not use their blogs much.
* A network of volunteers with usable expertise (in election law, say, or the purchase of advertising time) who are willing to help our bloggers and advise on projects, organized as a searchable data base.
* Good quality disclosure forms and routines that make it make it crystal clear where a contributor is coming from, who she is, and is for.
* Pro editors and writers who volunteer to mentor and consult with talented bloggers as they are spotted bublbing up from OffTheBus personal blogs.
There won't be any elaborate chain of command as there is in a newsroom, just page editors filtering (and sending our messages with their choices) bloggers who publish what they choose, and the list from which people volunteer for big projects. The controls come in what we decide to promote to the front page and send out as daily feeds, and how we design our special initiatives.
The way it's developing, then, OffTheBus.Net will look a little like a campaign (because it involves organizing people) something like a news organization (which can hopefully break news), sorta like a specialized blogging platform (which we will try to equip with better and better tools in response to user demand) and even a bit like Assignment Zero at times (in that lots of people are helping to tackle one big story lasting 16 months.)
Realistically, with Michel and Exley and their background working for Democratic candidates, with the Huffington Post and its liberal profile in the online world, with Arianna (from L.A.) and Rosen (from the heartland of Manhattan) as publishers, this is going to be seen as a project originating on the "blue" side of red-blue politics. The majority of contributors will probably lean that way, as well, with a healthy number of independents and perhaps a few conservatives. (That's what our recruiting shows so far.)
This makes it way more of a challenge to cover the Republican candidates accurately and well, but we still think it can be done. Certainly we won't be crowing about the inherent "objectivity" of our coverage, or the professional distance our participants keep from politics. We won't require people to pledge that they haven't a single dog in any political fight. Those are virtues without much vitality in this kind of journalism, which is is participatory and indeed somewhat chaotic. But as we said in the news announcement: "Page editors as filters will apply the same standards of quality, accuracy and truthfulness to all posts and all candidates."
When I introduced the idea for OffTheBus at my blog, PressThink, I invited people within range to participate in politics by covering the campaign. Now we have gone a step further, hiring organizers who know how to work with volunteers, use the Net efficiently, and hold down coordination costs, trusting they can more easily learn the journalism part than journalists could learn what Exley and Michel know about the human factor in open systems.
They both understand that the falling costs for like-minded people to find each other, share information and collaborate on good works (as well as works of evil....) probably means we can do new and exciting things in journalism, but it is still very hard to do those things because our knowledge of how to organize scattered people with limited time and definite interest is still primitive.
I do know this: Open platforms do not resemble and cannot be made to run like closed systems such as a professional newsroom presents. They are different systems. They have different advantages, different costs. They require different skills to operate. I don't think OffTheBus is going to blow horse race journalism out of the water. And I don't think it's going to be easy to realize gains from the open style in campaign reporting. There's a long way to go before we know how to do it.
But I'd bet on these two to puzzle it out. Arianna and I just did.
Wanna join up? From Arianna's post:
We are especially looking for:
a) people who want to be part of our blog network and, as bloggers, correspondents, and critics follow a candidate, develop a beat or stake out some original territory.
b) people who want to join our mailing list and be notified about special projects and investigations they can help with.
c) people who have a special expertise, technical skill, or knowledge of campaigns or politics that our bloggers and staff could call on from time to time for advice and input.
So send your name, contact info, and a bit about your own interests in campaign coverage to offthebus@huffingtonpost.com. Email link.