creating networks

Citizen Joe is a political website with the express purpose to provide an alternative to the “he said, she said” political journalism media critics love to hate.

The site aims to be a truly non-partisan take on issues of the day. A typical CJ piece is so balanced, someone reading it wouldn’t know the political views of its writer; it's "simply the facts ma'am reporting."

CJ asks for volunteer contributors – average Joes—to write, edit, and comment on articles. Writers who gain editing privileges can edit any piece on the site using a wiki-based model that CJ hopes will increase participation.

I recently interviewed co-founder Julia Kamin about “Joe,” as it is affectionately known, and what lessons it might have for Newassignment.Net.

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Citizen Joe is a political website, but you will be hard pressed to find the names McCain, Obama, Rumsfeld, or Bush on the site. Nor will you read about campaign fumbles or dirty scandals. How would you describe CJ?

To try and entice political action "Midterm Madness” at The Washington Post and Predict06 have turned Election Day into a game: asking for predictions in every congressional race to see if your picks will match the final outcome and if the crowd is any good at predicting elections.

The Predict06 community, an experiment in political crowdsourcing, will forecast the outcome for each election by averaging over 50,000 votes collected in just three weeks.

A common buzzword in the media right now is "retooling." How can news organizations 'retool' for the Internet. But Bruno Guissani, who is advising a news magazine on just this very subject, thinks the answer isn't in simply becoming more web friendly, but going back to the fundamentals of journalism.

Journalism is about providing news, facts and analysis to help understanding, but it is also very much about relationships, about connecting people.

Right now the general trend in print publishing is pouring resources into websites to do minute-by-minute wire stories, video reports, reporter blogs and user-generated content, but what's missing said Guissani is trying to figure out how to maintain the relationship that journalism seeks to create.