Ladies & Gentlemen,
For better or worse, Progressive Congress News went live the day after the election. There are twenty three of us on the mailing list and we're tracking policy news for Congressional staff in the following areas:
Environment, Energy, Economy, Education, Labor, LGBT Issues, Immigration, Healthcare, Transportation, and National Security.
There is a daily summary email going out and you can sign up to see it right here.
This is turning into a massive labor and I'm here to beg whatever assistance the community can render ...
This all got started last April when we were visiting Progressive Congress at their D.C. office. Near the end of the meeting Darcy handed me a clutch of papers - more about what they do, and various strategic plans for the Progressive community.. I tucked them into my backpack and didn't pay a lot of attention until the ride home.
The piece on the Progressive echo chamber caught my eye. We were already doing a lot of different things with Twitter and I knew it was the right platform to build a management system to tie the rest of social media together. We also knew that long term a human filtered system was the only way to put a stop to the constant right wing propaganda. This was the first cause that drove the creation of Progressive Congress News.
Today, three weeks into the operation, I'm please to report a truly amazing event - someone sent us several hundred dollars as a donation(!) They'd read about my health care travails and asked what they could do to assist. I'm leery of taking money directly, but funds routed to Progressive Congress to support the news will drive all sorts of good things.
And one of those good things is the pursuit of the Knight Foundation's massive News Challenge grant. Today this thing is so grassroots we didn't even pay for a domain name for it. Last year the 12 Knight News Challenge winners split $2.74 million among them. The smallest grant was $74,000, the largest was $400,000. I believe that what we've already accomplished exceeds some of the plans that got grants last year.
Pretty soon we'll have a proper donation link like nyceve & slinekrwink had when they were working on health care reform, but in the meantime what we really need are blogger hands and eyes we can expand and solidify our offering. Here's the job description ...
Read a variety of news sources during the day. Select five to fifteen top quality pieces to include in the Twitter based news feed for your policy area. Near the end of the day help pick the three best stories for inclusion in the next day's email update.
Doesn't sound like all that much? Sure, but when there are two dozen of us doing it using a broadly available system ... we're starting to replace our rotten corporate media with something that works for civic engagement. And that's a Big Freakin' Deal.
Don't worry if you don't know Twitter or NetVibes or paper.li or TweetDeck. We've got lots of techie help around to make that stuff go. Don't worry if you're not sure if you're ready to be a 21st century journalist. Our national security editor retired from the AP, his last position was head of their Asia Bureau, and there are others who've had their feet to the fire with fact checking and deadlines. We're all learning as we go in this strange new world of news.
You can see what's going on by checking the Progressive Congress News NetVibes front page. You can sign up for the daily mail right here and see the news that we're producing based on the feedback from several House chiefs of staff.
If you can write a blog post, or if you're active on Twitter, or if you've got an issues oriented Facebook group, then we need you. Oh, and did I mention that we're the only policy news operation that is providing content to the 195,000 subscribers on the VisibleVote mobile/Facebook platform? Yeah, we are getting the Progressive message up out of these orange padded walls and in front of people who'd never think to look in here.
Don't know what else to say - help us stamp out the likes of Fox News by sharing your time and energy? Hope to hear from you soon ...