From Brian Kroski who was interviewed at the Networked Journalism Summit here.

“Observer Media Group, the parent company of The New York Observer, is launching a project covering local politics through a distributed network of reporters, editors and columnists. This project will put reporters on the ground in all 50 states of the US, covering local politics news and national stories with a local perspective. This distributed network of reporters will be provided with tools to allow them to file photos, stories, and videos immediately - directly from their locations. These individual states will be their own news media sources and also contributed to a national aggregated, built from the bottom-up politics news site. This project was recently profiled in the New York Times.”

So it seems the New York Observer’s parent company is moving into networked journalism in a big way: Politicker.com

“When editors are going to assign a story we typically think about different elements that go into it; who is the writer, who is the photographer, do we want a video or a podcast or any kind of poll? Now we ask an additional question: what is the community aspect?”

I met Ed Sussman briefly at the Networked Journalism Summit where we talked about Drupal, a subject I’m fond of. I didn’t know it at the time, but Ed, along with Lullabot, was working on a massive relaunch of FastCompany.com using the open source content management system Drupal.

If you haven’t checked out the site - you should. It is one of the most sophisticated implementations of Drupal I’ve seen. The NY Observer, for example uses Drupal in a very sleek manner - and while the site looks great, the social networking capabilities aren’t there. Fast Company, however, is trying to leverage the networking aspects of Drupal in every way possible - from user-generated content blogs, to bookmarking, crowdsourcing questions and letting people make business contacts. They’ve spread their arms out pretty wide in the hopes that they caught something interesting for everyone. I think they are about 3-5 years ahead of their time in terms of internet publishing with a major magazine.

I caught up with Ed briefly to talk about the new site and what lessons there might be for beat bloggers. I think Fast Company is moving more and more in the direction of beat blogging - and their website is about 3-5 years ahead of their time in this respect. If you have any doubt about their intentions - just consider their recent contract with Robert Scoble, one of the original great bloggers period, who today literally broadcasts moments of his live in streaming video via Qik, Twitter, Facebook and whatever means he can, to connect and chat with viewers in real time.

So, without further adieu - here’s the interview.

This site is more than just “beat blogging” - it’s creating a network for your site. You have dived head first into the deep end. Why?

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Received via email from Chris Lydom at Open Source Radio.

“Dear Friend of Open Source:

The summer is over, and so is our hiatus.

The Open Source conversation is reborn at the Watson Institute at Brown University.

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A conference call took place between Jim Colgan and Howard Parnell  from WNYC, Mackenzie Warren from News-Press, Jay Rosen and myself from NewAssignment.Net and Jeff Howe (almost all profiled in this section) took place earlier today.

The seeds for this call began at the Networked Journalism Summit when Jim Colgan and Mackenzie Warren began talking and realized they were both looking for a software solution that would enable a more seamless effort in crowdsourced journalism.

After some emails back and forth a conference call was organized and the participants have agreed to move forward and 1. Determine what this software would look like and 2. Find a way to make it happen.

Details about this endeavor will be disclosed publicly as they come to fruition.

At the Networked Journalism Summit Leonard Witt grabbed Lisa Williams for a quick discussion about an idea he has called Representative Journalism.

Here’s his quick update.

Back at Jeff Jarvis’s Networked Journalism Summit as I was networking with Lisa Williams of Placeblogger.com and telling her about Representative Journalism and about a grant I was writing aimed to it. She took a look at my grant proposal and then wrote in it:

Journalism is becoming a high-tech profession. And like other high-tech professions such as software and biotechnology, professionals experience instability – layoffs, job changes, changes in their organization’s mission. The good news about this change is that it provides entrepreneurial opportunities for journalists – but few journalists are taking advantage of these opportunities.

I am now trying to incorporate that thought into my own ideas as I try to advance this Representative Journalism concept. Right now I am trying to come up with a full blown Representative Journalism plan so I am blogging on it less but thinking of Representative Journalism more than ever.

OffTheBus.Net has shared content GroundReport and this week is doing a four day collaborative investigation with WNYC’s Brian Lehrer show.

These working relationships are direct results of the Networked Journalism Summit.

If you’ve started a working relationship with anybody from the NJS, let us know!

NewAssignment.Net is Jay Rosen’s experiment to spur innovation in open platform journalism. I work for NewAssignment.Net as “director of distributed reporting.”

Details about our next project can be found at this post on PressThink. We are still looking for a few news organizations to partner with us. If you are interested, contact Jay Rosen (his email is in the PressThink post).

(update):  Jay’s announcement and a link to the full site: BeatBlogging.Org

We here at NJN Public Television are looking to add more interactivity to our site by allowing each of our in-house shows to have their own blog for posting and receiving comments. This was something that we didn’t have before but we’ve learned how popular they have become in making sites more user-friendly. We’re trying to gain more traffic and allow people to stay on the site longer.

In the short term, Why Tuesday? is pursuing our presidential candidates to respond to our candidate challenge. Driving throughout the State of Iowa until October 31st with camera-in-hand, we will air how our candidates feel about America’s low voter turnout, making election reform and increased voter participation issues that nobody can ignore. We have also submitted a video question for TechPresident’s 10 Questions initiative.

In the long term, Why Tuesday? will continue to build our constituency with the goal of becoming a megaphone for America’s election reform discussions. Each week we release a new episode about elections or election reforms. Why Tuesday? is also actively recruiting correspondents to help with the task of interviewing as many elected officials as possible about election reform and the significance of low voter turnout. Utilizing our videos, we want to educate about election reform and hold our politicians responsible for improving America’s voting system.

We at Why Tuesday?, an archetypical new media project, found the Summit to be very helpful and especially enjoyed the afternoon sessions on political coverage and news/video advocacy. We look forward to a continuing relationship with Off The Bus, AirCongress, and TechPresident. And we would like to discuss how we can more effectively utilize our Web 2.0 platform with Ellen Miller from the Sunlight Foundation, Earmark Watch, and Wiki the Vote .

Thanks,

Why Tuesday? Staff

BrooWaha.com is a citizen newspaper which focuses on local community interests. Its purpose is to be a premium source of local news written by average people, who have the fastest access to information and who are unaffiliated with traditional media sources, which are often less interested in covering smaller stories of local significance. BrooWaha seeks to become a fresh way for people to get news and interact within their communities.

Started in Los Angeles in a makeshift bedroom office, BrooWaha is now in six cities, and several more editions are scheduled to launch soon. Five hundred authors from around the U.S. submit articles and BrooWaha gets over 100,000 page views per month. The site was featured on the cover of the Calendar section of the Los Angeles Times as an example of the new face of citizen journalism in an article titled “Reporting’s Mass Appeal.”

The website contains many uniquely designed features which promote participation and interaction between users. For example, BrooWaha users have access to mailboxes, a messaging system, chat-rooms, and friend lists. Also, users can track their own articles with readership statistics, popularity rankings, etc… They can also rate other users’ articles, leave comments, and review them. The culture of mass participation is new to the news industry- authors not only write cutting-edge stories about happenings in their communities, they receive feedback and make friends who share an interest in the same local activities or issues. Readers follow up with authors for more information on topics of interest and meet other readers who comment on similar issues.

BrooWaha appeals to a mass audience. At its most grass-roots level, appeals to local citizens who want to get involved in their communities and read about local issues and happenings. However, the website also has a commercial aspect. Once further developed, it will appeal to media outlets who want to surf on the citizen media wave to test the pulse of local communities, local governments and organizations who want to get local issues and events publicized, advertisers who want to target local audiences, such as retailers of all sizes, and also to individuals who want to break into the publishing industry but who lack the means to pursue traditional methods. These groups will all benefit from BrooWaha because it is uniquely tailored to the needs of people with an interest for fast, relevant, local news.

The next step in the project will be to enable users to launch their own editions, invite their friends to write, and collect advertisement revenues on the traffic they generate. Also, I would like to create a customizable citizen journalism platform which would be licensable to small town newspapers, local governments, and organizations, for use in community outreach initiatives.

The project requires financing to maximize its potential. I am also open to having people join the project and help me take it to the next step. Please feel free to contact me at ariel@broowaha.com if you are interested in these opportunities.