What’s a good woman to do when a real tramp moves in right next door? Skirts too high, neck lines too low, and the willingness to do and say anything for attention? The children might be scrubbed and schooled, the house clean, and dinner on the table promptly at six, but even so a spectacle like that draws the eye ... and sets urges in motion.
This was the situation faced by the handmaidens of democracy, our various journalistic efforts, when Fox News arrived on the scene in 1996. Fourteen years later they’ll all dive for a starlet without panties like a rugby team going for a loose ball and the Tea Party, the political news equivalent of furry pr0n, is treated as if it isn’t some synthetic fetish.
America’s fourth estate is as crashed as any institution we have and Congress is afraid to get its reform on with other issues because of the chattering pack of cable news trollops, let alone directly addressing that problem.
Reforming the media is up to us ...
A functional democracy needs a functional media. We lost that function about the time Bush came into office. The lights started to come on by 2004 and the blogosphere roared into existence, participating in the 2006 reversal of Karl Rove’s "permanent majority", assisting in the retaking of the Senate and Presidency in 2008 ... and then we were largely discarded by those inside the beltway.
There are a lot of theories behind this but my take is that there are two sorts of people in Washington, D.C. - those that benefit from the corruption, and those who are terrified of the consequences of touching the mess. Those of us outside the cushy nest within I-495 understand that homelessness isn’t just the domain of street mumblers and lack of access to health care is more than just a statistical matter.
I’ve been both thrilled by the energy and talent I see here, and completely disgusted at the reactivity and lack of process management. I noticed Twitter thanks to a front page article here and the tobogan ride began. I spent some time posing as a right winger, then I moved on to organizing with the Blog Workers Industrial Union, then into campaign work via Progressive PST, and most recently into a policy oriented bi-directional news service.
I’m just an Open Source Intelligence tool maker - the plan for a daily news service addressing the policy maker’s needs came to me as an afterthought. Darcy Burner pressed a clutch of position papers about Progressive Congress into my hand as we were finishing up our first meeting at her office on Capitol Hill last April. I looked them all over after I got home and this idea seemed like it might benefit from some of the things we were doing.
Fast forward four months and we’ve got a system that is ready to handle energy, environment, economy, education, immigration, labor, healthcare, LGBT issues, and national security.
This is all likely to get a new skin - I’ll stand by the framing and plumbing, but appearance is not my life’s focus. That being said, the basic functions are present. The daily news papers, produced with paper.li have their own tabs, and the nine policy domain Twitter accounts share three tabs. The very first page introduces the system and provides links to the nine NetVibes based news rooms. You can explore for yourself by clicking right here.
Like what you see? The news rooms have different content, but the layout is the same - news, views,opposition, buzz, a situation room, and a page displaying the editors’ personal Twitter feeds. The daily paper itself appears in a tab after this and, if the editors so choose, lists of high value contributors are used to create further daily reading in addition to the carefully curated main paper. The sources for news are the feeds clearly listed coupled with personal interaction between the editors and their associates.
More importantly, do you like what you don’t see? "Lindsay Lohan" will only appear if there is a critique of our rotted media in the mix. You’ll see Andrew Breitbart’s name a few times a week in my personal feed, as I’m in the habit of insulting him and his larcenous news manufacturing operation, but we’d never actually repeat any of the crap he gins up. Glenn Beck? Oh, yes, every time one of his nuts is caught en route to shooting up some Progressive institution we’ll be on that, but since we have the journalistic integrity so lacking in paid journalism we’ll never be caught bearing some conspiracy theory as if it’s real news.
And if I could eliminate the ads in the paper.li output I’d do so right this minute, but that’s how they pay for their system. Other than that you’ll find no distractions - this service is about attention conservation, and it’s going to be as distraction free as we can make it.
So that's that - I got utterly fed up with the lack of actual journalism among those being paid to do such things, I innovated a tiny bit, stirred up some fellow activists in a broad social movement, and created what ought to be a functional alternative. If you've got comments, questions, news tidbits, or best of all if you've done some solid policy oriented diary that you want to get seen you can hunt me up as @StrandedWind on Twitter.
And as for you media trollops, you're on notice - Objective Facts, Progressive Views - get used to hearing that phrase.
(UPDATE: rec list - an unexpected surprise. Thanks. You can find the editors for the various areas on Twitter ...)
@RL_Miller is does the editing for environment and has a whole pack of people working on climate activism. This is the model for how we hope to see things go - lots of good news, outreach to activists and Congressional staff, mainstream media nosing around to pick up stories, etc.
@Unenergy is handling energy.
@ekyprogressive just got started with health care.
@MsCBSoxy has taken on some of the labor editing and I believe we'll have two others joining us shortly.
@1whoknu is forwarding information on good economy feeds and may be interested in some of the daily production.
@quietis was our very first to set up anything, doing both LGBT and immigration. She is busy during the day so @QueerjohnPA says he'll do LGBT and @mamitamala says she'll help with immigration. Lil bad mama is hidden, but she's one of the leaders at @VivirLatino, a Twitter feed that has a blog behind it.
Gotta give a shout out to @TrumanProject, who can not provide an editor for us, but who have gone to great lengths to introduce us to good national security feeds.
And lest you think I invented this all on my own I gave credit to some of the thinkers behind this stuff in a recent diary on OpenLeft entitled Credit Where Credit Is Due: Progressive Congress News Feeds Genesis
(FURTHER UPDATE:
Lots of people who never even noticed the twenty or thirty thoughtful diaries with screen shots and stuff describing the theory and practice behind Open Source Intelligence have decided they don't like the metaphor that was required to actually gain some attention.
The announcement the grownups got, entitled Progressive Congress News Feeds Architecture, showed up over on OpenLeft.
I believe I said something earlier about reactivity and a lack of focus on what is important. quod erat demonstrandum.