The approved-blogger list offers a diverse array, from high-profile progressive sites like TPM, FireDogLake and AMERICAblog to topical and less well-known blogs (BeliefNet, Towleroad, The Center for Emerging Media, Vivir Latino). A frequent MinMon partner also made the cut: Citizen videoblogging outfit The UpTake will be covering the Democrats’ nominating convention. 

The honor for “excellence in opinion journalism,” one of seven prizes awarded this year, recognized the piece “Who owns the J-word? Videoblogger’s Jailing Raises Questions for Journalists,” which chronicled the case of San Francisco’s Josh Wolf, who was jailed for 226 days after refusing to give law enforcement footage of a rally in which self-identified anarchists scuffled with police. To the ire of some in the field, Wolf argued that he’s a journalist and therefore covered by California’s “shield law,” which protects unnamed sources.

“This article was very timely — it raises important questions about a key piece of our democracy — the fourth estate,” wrote the Premack judges. “It asked ‘What is the future of journalism?’ and “What do we make of all these new voices?’”

Also receiving honors were: the Star Tribune newsroom for its team coverage of the 35-W collapse; The Rushford Tri-County Record for its coverage of the 2007 flood (when the paper was without a newsroom); the Rochester Post-Bulletin’s immigration series, “Broken Border”; Star Tribune reporter David Schaffer for his investigation of water contamination in Minneapolis; Kerry Ashmore of The Northeaster for an opinion piece on immigration; and veteran Pioneer Press writer Bill Salisbury, who was honored with the Graven Award for his 30+ years of political reporting at the state capitol. The 31st annual Premack awards, administered by the Minnesota Journalism Center, will be awarded at a ceremony April 29 on the University of Minnesota campus.

Minnesota Monitor is sad to be unable to put up the purchase price, especially after this flattering article that claims we are the fourth most frequently mentioned online news site among local media folk. With number three being…The Rake!

Eyeblast.tv head Daniel Glover outlined some of the potential political uses of his video site. Users could, for instance, record local examples of media bias, tape instances of leftist activists harassing conservative speakers on college campuses, or seek to catch liberals in their own “Macaca moments.” Glover also pointed to the progressive Center for Independent Media as a model for citizen journalism he hoped conservatives could emulate and improve upon.

Thanks for reading!

The Minnesota Monitor, a collaborative state-based blog, is a peek into what the future of local blogging might look like. While the bloggers at the Monitor weigh in on the heady national issue du jour, they also write about the issues itching Minnesotans (posts often circle around how the Republican National Committee is preparing for the convention in Saint Paul). What sets Minnesota Monitor apart from other local blogs is how professional it feels: the site itself is well-designed, the writing fresh, well-edited, and often reported. The Monitor, and its sister sites, state-based blogs funded by the Center for Independent Media, stand out from the crowd.

Read the full piece after the break…

The New Barbarians

Local bloggers are shaking up the media and politics as usual

by Brendan Mackie

BloggersIn a dimly lit bar an overwhelmingly male crowd jabbers in various degrees of tipsiness, dreaming about battalions of camcorder-armed citizen journalists who record every politicians’ every move, edit it, and put it online. Conversation tonight, however blurry with beer, is more likely to steer toward polling data and endorsements than the new episode of Lost. This is the Minneapolis chapter of Drinking Liberally, a web of progressive groups that congregate in 46 states and the nation’s capital “promoting democracy one pint at a time.”

Political junkies have been gathering in smoky backrooms from Athens to Philadelphia for the full course of democracy. But there’s something markedly different about these political junkies. They are mostly local political bloggers, and as such are relative newcomers to the game. The doings of these bloggers might not seem any sexier than a shut-in adding the latest article about Ron Paul to his Digg profile, but political blogging-especially the local variety-could drastically reshape the face of political reporting and politics.

At the turn of the millennium, political blogging seemed sentenced to the lonely backwoods of nerddom, along with Star Trek and the polka. But all that changed in the primaries for the 2004 presidential election, when Howard Dean-buoyed by the support of large antiwar websites like MoveOn.org and Daily Kos-pulled in buckets of cash from the new internet grassroots (quickly christened the “netroots”). The money allowed Dean to assume a formidable perch at the head of the pack as the primaries got rolling and branded the netroots as a powerful force in liberal politics. Over the next few years, blogging edged its way into the mainstream, and the once free-flowing discourse became dominated by a handful of big-name bloggers.

Then came the 2006 midterm elections. National blogs pushed the senatorial candidacy of the antiwar Ned Lamont in Connecticut, who mounted a primary challenge against the deeply entrenched (and deeply conservative) Joe Lieberman. Even though Lamont lost the general election to a newly Independent Lieberman (after besting him in the primary) the scuffle sent a message to Democrats that the netroots had enough power to dismount a political bastion. Republican presidential hopeful George Allen spat a racial slur a few months later, and when the video hit YouTube it routed Allen’s ambitions like a bad bout of the whooping cough can derail a first date.

In the last four years blogs have gone from an obscure wonk-hangout to a respected-if somewhat independent-salon of political debate, endorsing candidates and hobbling political careers in the process. The big names in the blogosphere were nobodies six year ago and now have their blogs featured on the websites of the old guards of the traditional media: Matthew Yglesias, for instance, began his personal blog in 2002 and is now at the Atlantic. Matt Drudge turned his conservative-leaning email list into one of the most visited websites on the Internet.

For all the hype, blogging has not yet reached the apex of its importance. As traditional media struggle to gain a foothold outside of print, they will increasingly turn to bloggers who, emerging from their parents’ basements, will change the processes of politics and media.

Though the media mavens’ eyes have turned to the big national blogs, the real change will happen on the local level, where small-to-medium sized operations will be able to report on local issues and swing the crucial votes that can make or break smaller elections. Here, for all the hubbub about the big name bloggers, is where blogging can really make a difference.

You can read your local newspaper for decades and never see its writers in person. Walk into the local chapter of Drinking Liberally and you can see your favorite blogger, maybe drunk, and engage him on your pet set of issues. “It’s an interaction you can’t have with a newspaper,” says Robin Marty, a blogger at the Minnesota Monitor and an organizer of the Minneapolis chapter of Drinking Liberally. “There’s a personal voice that’s added to it. That’s what engages a reader.”

The Minnesota Monitor, a collaborative state-based blog, is a peek into what the future of local blogging might look like. While the bloggers at the Monitor weigh in on the heady national issue du jour, they also write about the issues itching Minnesotans (posts often circle around how the Republican National Committee is preparing for the convention in Saint Paul). What sets Minnesota Monitor apart from other local blogs is how professional it feels: the site itself is well-designed, the writing fresh, well-edited, and often reported. The Monitor, and its sister sites, state-based blogs funded by the Center for Independent Media, stand out from the crowd.

What are these blogs trying to do? Local blogs are not angling to supplant the dominance of traditional media and become the new newspapers. Through a mix of pointing to and commenting on news stories, and reporting their own stories, local blogs like these look to be an appendix to traditional media-a knowing comment on the chattering bulk of newspapers, TV shows, and magazines. Many bloggers even see their efforts as aimed at traditional reporters, who they hope will pick up their stories and storylines.

In many cases, the mainstream media does just that. Chase Martyn, managing editor of Iowa Independent, a prominent local political blog also funded by the Center for Independent Media, said that back in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses the media and politicians were “watching our every move. When we post something we sometimes get press inquiries and angry phone calls from campaigns only an hour after the story goes up.”

As local blogs are busy courting the attention of the mainstream media, the mainstream media have been trying to figure out blogs’ success. Marty at the Minnesota Monitor sees bloggers and newspapers in a race to develop a new style of interaction with readers, one that mixes the easy demeanor of blogs with the credibility of newspapers.

“Everybody’s still trying to find the perfect match of how you can have the immediacy of a blog, but have the reputation, sourcing, and confidence in the material of a newspaper,” she said. “Eventually I don’t know whether bloggers will get the quality, or if the newspapers are going to figure out how to be quick enough and how to be natural, but they are going to get closer and closer to that middle ground.”

If you look only at the impact that local blogs have on the broader media, though, you will miss out on a huge part of their appeal. The tens of thousands of words, the hundreds of links, the incessant tracking of stories and storylines, the obsessions of the blogs-it all may seem to be terribly centered on the narratives of politics: who did what, when, where, how. But local blogs are more than a centralized information clearinghouse; they can often become a meeting place for like-minded activists, where the issues and debates play out in real time. Readers might start visiting a blog to get information they agree with, but they keep coming back to the blog to add to voluminous comment threads, become involved in the campaigns, or find stories to write about on a blog of their own.

The locals who put their energy into blogs are often the same committed, urgent people who make up the bulk of politics’ shock troops: the door-knockers, the phone-bankers, the donators. When involved in local politics, in which the energetic actions of a few committed individuals can make or break a race, this social aspect of blogs might be more important than its traditional journalistic activities. Functions like Drinking Liberally are the natural next step in blogging, taking politically active people away from their computer screens so they can find each other and begin to organize around shared issues.

The path to a blog-connected civic utopia is not paved with flowers, though. The same democratic impulse that makes blogs so accessible also means they lack credibility. The stories of large news organization, edited and (hopefully) fact-checked, have an aura of austere authority. The misspelled, over-caffeinated screeds of the blogosphere don’t. Even a large national blog, hosted and linked to by the traditional media, has more believability than some political junkie living in Iowa.

But in some way, these blogs don’t need to get around the problem of believability, because most readers don’t go to blogs for unbiased information. In a 2004 study (pdf) Thomas Johnson and Barbara Kaye showed that less than four in ten people think that blogs are fair. But six in ten think that they are believable. A blog’s bias is even seen as a strength: It allows them more depth, and since the bias is transparent, bloggers can be both honest and interested.

Nevertheless, for many bloggers-especially those seeking to influence the media-believability is crucial. Reporters need to trust a blog to use it as a source. Some local blogs are closing the credibility gap, although it will take some time. Chase Martyn said that the “mainstream media is paying more and more attention to local blogs, to the point that they are no longer afraid to take a story from a local blog and use it as a tip to write their own story. That hasn’t yet existed.”

Another problem facing local blogs is that national blogs are still dominating the conversation. Matt Stoller, who blogs at Open Left, thinks that the relationship is getting “healthier,” in part because the missions of the two groups are pretty much the same. “There are big fights going on in Congress and there are big fights going on in state legislative races and in local areas. The character of these fights is related; they’re all about the same power struggle. The national blogs are a kind of clearinghouse for the fights when they reach a national level of interest, but the hardcore work in terms of creating change is in this synthesis between national and local blogs.”

Local blogs have the power of brining abstract national issues to our homes. Local bloggers can write the story about the dead soldier next door, the struggling immigrants down the street, the corrupt politician representing the district. Stoller’s blog keeps a list of Bush-Dog Democrats: legislators who capitulated to the president on key issues. Local bloggers who find their legislator on the list will find their local fight plugged into a vibrant national struggle.

Political blogs might be trapped in a complicated hall of mirrors made up of blogrolls, links, comment threads, and campaigns that, while producing engaging conversations, do little to actually change the world. I spoke with John Swon, a blogger for the conservative website Truth vs. The Machine, who said that the problem was that blog writers and members of the media were all speaking the same “language of political wonkiness. They enjoy politics, they enjoy the issues, they enjoy debate. That’s something that’s outside the bounds of 95 percent of most voters.”

The phenomena of local political blogging could turn out to be another big balloon of hot air, and that balloon might burst once its illusion is poked hard enough. “The influence of blogs is very, very limited, except for the fact that they have the ear of some important people-which is more than some people can say. But that doesn’t necessarily translate to anything that happens at a poll,” Swon said.

But then again, there’s a reason why Swon continues to blog. He’s a political junkie. Political junkies find dry discussions of policy matters enlightening, even enlivening. The real power of local political blogs is that they have made part of the experience of talking about politics sexier and more informed-and they let political junkies get together and talk. By giving the policy wonks in our communities a soapbox, local blogs have amplified amateur concerns, turning hobby interests into something powerful. These blogs may facilitate nothing more than people talking with themselves. But, as Stoller says, “There’s nothing wrong with talking to yourself.”

Washington Independent and the non-profit news model

A Center for Independent Media startup doles out mix of hard news, investigative journalism and in-depth blogs.
By Jim Wayne
Posted: 2008-02-12
Topix

Financial support for OJR’s coverage of social media is provided in part by Topix:
Topix is the leading news community on the Web, connecting people to the information and discussions that matter to them in every U.S. town and city. Apply to edit your local news today: www.topix.com

We’ve all read ad nauseam about the panic-stricken newspaper corporation spinning its wheels to retrofit its properties for the Web. Some have found ways to do it effectively. Most haven’t. You’re sure to have caught examples of each on this site.

Non-profit news startups are similarly testing the waters, but without all that ink, paper and, er, personnel to worry about. The model evolves with each new project, but the formula for success looks to be a healthy balance of guerilla and traditional; loose and tight. Launched in January, D.C.-based is the new kid on the block.

With a collective editorial resume that lists The New Republic, Talking Points Memo and Financial Times, The Independent reigns in the ground-up-meets-top-down model that Marc Cooper talked to us about a few months ago with HuffPo’s Off The Bus project.

A Center for Independent Media site, its siblings include non-profit news staples The Iowa Independent, The Minnesota Monitor and The Colorado Confidential. And what The Washington Independent lacks in alliteration it makes up for with a hearty balance of investigative features, well-researched commentary and bloggy news analysis. It’s a versatile news trough for those who take their in-depth clean coal reports with a side of quick-hit caucus commentary.

We swapped emails with Washington Independent Editor Allison Silver to learn more about the new endeavor and its meaning for non-profit journalism.

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OJR: So, you just launched a few weeks ago. How is traffic looking so far? Where are the readers coming from and how are you getting your name out there?

Allison Silver: I am delighted to have this opportunity to talk with you about my brand-new site, The Washington Independent. And it is brand new. We had a semi-hard launch on Jan. 28, and we are still in Beta as we work out some of the kinks. For less than two weeks, I think we are doing quite well. We are currently listed on both The Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo. Josh Marshall had a nice post about us on TPM, and now MetaFilter has posted an item about us. We are planning some other things as we go about raising our profile, and the quality of our content should also draw some attention.

OJR: Can you talk a bit about your relationship with the Center for Independent Media?

AS: The Center for Independent is our umbrella organization, our parent. David Bennahum, our president and CEO, had four state sites up and running-in Colorado, Minnesota, Michigan and Iowa. He hired Jefferson Morley from The Washington Post, as the center’s editorial director and they decided to launch a Washington site, covering national issues. Jeff contacted me, since he felt this was something I would be interested in. He was right.

OJR: If I get one thing from your mission statement, it’s “in-depth, accurate and, most importantly, fast.” What sort of staff does it take to pull that off, and to what extent do you accept freelance submissions?

AS: We have an extremely nimble and saavy young staff, including Spencer Ackerman, covering national security (who was at The New Republic and TPM), Holly Yeager, covering the presidential campaign (who was at Financial Times) and Mike Lillis, covering Congress (who was at Inside Washington).

I am also featuring a robust commentary element. The pieces are written by well-known scholars and experts. For example, we had Robert Dallek, the historian who has examined the lives of Johnson and Kennedy and FDR, write about the role of a former president, pegged to Bill Clinton’s travels on the campaign trail for his wife.

We would be interested in seeing freelance submissions. We are looking for smart reported pieces or strong commentary.

OJR: Your sister sites feel a little more bloggy than yours. How did the professional/citizen journalism balance you hope to achieve factor into your page design?

AS: We are still in the process of working out our page design. But one way of looking at your question is that the Net is about democracy and we want our users to be fully engaged in the writing we post. Already, one informed reader contacted Spencer after his waterboarding piece was posted, and now Spencer is working on a piece involving that comment.

OJR: We talked to The Huffington Post about an election spinoff project that strives for the same balance; ground-up content steeped in the values of traditional journalism. What other similar sites have you seen, and how do you think yours is different?

AS: There are many other strong sites out there like The Huffington Post-including TPM and Slate and Salon. But I think the Net is not about competition, or limitations. It’s indeed like democracy-because it’s about making the pie bigger.

I think our mix of reported longer pieces and reported blog, to tell a longer narrative, and our extremely informed commentary is the next step for the Net. Well, we should say, one next step. The Net is many, many things.

OJR: Can you talk a bit about working for a non-profit versus an advertising-based news publication? How do you compare and contrast the two from an editorial standpoint?

AS: As for working on a non-profit, I am sure you know that part of all informed discussion about the future of journalism involves the non-profit model. This is one reason why so many people are interested in what happens with Poynter and the St. Petersberg paper.

OJR: It must be tough to veer from politics these days, but what other types of reports can we expect to see at the Independent in the near future?

AS: Politics is so exciting right now. This campaign is all those hyphenated words-jaw-dropping, breath-taking.

But there is so much else going on. As I said earlier, Spencer Ackerman is reporting on national security issues, and we have already had commentary on this subject from James Bamford, who wrote two important books on the NSA, and Milt Bearden, the former director of clandestine services at the CIA. We have strong economic and financial coverage. Mary Kane, who was formerly with Newhouse papers, is doing great work about the brick-and-mortar reality of the subprime crisis.

And we have solid environmental coverage-look at our current piece that examines just how green an airline could be-and science reporting.

Related stories: management, political blogs

I was the first to write about a then-little-known clause in the Star Tribune’s contract with the Minnesota Newspaper Guild that eventually enabled dozens of reporters and editors to flee the paper with sizable paychecks, and I broke news that big names like Eric Black, Jim Boyd and Dane Smith were taking buyouts. I covered the rubberband-tight tensions brought on by the sale: a veteran staffer’s daily meditation misconstrued as espionage, protesters in black armbands outside Strib HQ, an award-winning sportswriter’s (ultimately unsuccessful) bid to save his job and the galling zaniness surrounding, well, just about everything Par Ridder did.

My favorite story of the year was none of these, but closely related.

On this last day of 2007, looking forward to a year when the Twin Cities hosts the Republican convention, Democrats are hoping to capture more congressional seats, and Minnesota’s unique personalities — from Keith Ellison and Michele Bachmann to Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar — are aiming to make an impact in our nation’s capital, I’m interested in what happened to the Washington, D.C., bureau of the Star Tribune this year — and, in news that has nothing to do with Minnesota’s largest daily, discussing what will hopefully be a happy ending to this tale.In March, Rep. Betty McCollum’s office sent out a memo that, in part, bid a grateful farewell to longtime Star Tribune D.C. reporters Rob Hotakainen and Kevin Diaz, who were staying with McClatchy, the company that had just sold the paper to Avista. Avista lowballed the pair on salaries; at the time, Diaz said the offer would effectively mean giving “back every performance pay raise I’ve received since I came to Washington in 2000.”

Strib management was incensed that McCollum’s memo gave “the misimpression that the Star Tribune will now be covering Congress only with an intern,” as Kate Parry, readers’ representative at the time, put it. She argued that the last remaining Stribber in D.C., University of Minnesota grad Brady Averill, would be assisted by McClatchy news wires and Minneapolis-based editors.

In fact, Averill was the paper’s only D.C.-based employee for 78 days in 2007. A week after her internship ended in May, management announced it’d be rehiring Diaz.

Today, Diaz is the Star Tribune’s only full-timer, aided by an intern. The Pioneer Press doesn’t have anyone in D.C.

According to Tom Hamburger, a Pulitzer finalist for his work with the Star Tribune and now a Los Angeles Times writer, the Washington bureau had five employees when he started there in 1989 — four full-timers and an intern.

So where’s the good news?

Right here. Minnesota Monitor’s parent organization, the nonprofit Center for Independent Media (CIM), is opening what could be considered Minnesota’s biggest D.C.-based news bureau. The Washington Independent, now in press-release mode but launching in mid-January, will have a staff of 10 to 12 reporters and editors covering Washington with an eye for the states with CIM daily news sites (Colorado, Iowa, Michigan and Minnesota).

The site has hired a bevy of staffers who have worked for the Washington Post, Talking Points Memo, The Charlie Rose Show, Associated Press, and The Nation, to name a few. But it’s a two-way deal:

Minnesota gets original news from Washington reported by writers who know us and our state. They’ll cover policies that affect us, track our elected officials and provide on-the-ground resources for Minnesota Monitor fellows reporting on national issues. And when, say, they’d like to know how a bill before Congress will affect working people in Minnesota, we’ll be there to help find those voices.

But The Independent will also pick up the best daily news from Minnesota, giving our writers a direct pipeline to decision-makers in Washington. In times when regional papers are trimming down (or packing up) national desks, we’ll have one — and, more unique, The Independent will have something nearly unheard of: satellite bureaus in four states.

Better yet, the plan is to lay out a clear career path for young journalists in our state programs: Eventually, The Washington Independent will have at least one Minnesotan covering our news.

The mantra at the Star Tribune of late has been “local, local” — it’s mandated that editorials will only focus on local issues, it’s reassigned reporters with years of expertise in a range of beats to cover the suburbs, and it’s zoned editions, to provide specific communities with ultra-local news.

For the 16 months since our inception, Minnesota Monitor has lived “local, local,” and in 2008, we’ll continue that intense focus, aided by a much-needed new website design and some new faces. But with an office full of new Washington colleagues, we hope to broaden our coverage — to fill in the gaps left by a changing mainstream news business.

When I wrote about Diaz’s departure in March, I concluded with his less-than-optimistic assessment of an industry facing buyouts and belt-tightening.

“Welcome to the modern American newsroom,” he said.

In 2008, maybe those same words can take on a more hopeful tone.

A pat on the Black: A-list Washington Post blogger Chris Cillizza published all 33 nominations for his  best state reporters post and included one from Minnesota, Eric Black, a Center for Independent Media fellow and MinMon writer from May through December. Loose lips… At a media panel at Metro State early this month, I mentioned to a co-panelist that the Center for Independent Media will soon be launching a Washington, D.C. site. Before I could write a word on The Washington Independent, he — the capable David Brauer of MinnPost — chatted up CIM’s CEO David Bennehum on the new venture and wrote a good piece on the bureau. A dozen editors and reporters with experience writing for TalkingPointsMemo, the Washington Post and others will cover national news with an eye toward Minnesota and other states where CIM has sites; we’ll run their stories from time to time, and they’ll take the best of Minnesota Monitor for D.C. audiences. “CIM’s move is more than lighting a candle in the darkness; it’s the necessary future arriving,” Brauer wrote. “The for-profit locals have decided D.C. doesn’t pay, but the need for locally relevant national coverage hasn’t diminished.” I’ll write more on the site, now in press-release mode, in the coming days.

Morley and the Lone Gunman theory: In the current issue of Playboy, CIM national editorial director Jefferson Morley digs into the “new JFK assassination files” finding that “a handful of top CIA officials had far greater knowledge of [Lee Harvey] Oswald in the weeks before Kennedy was killed than they ever let on, and at least one of these operatives remained quiet about what he knew to perhaps a criminal extent” and that “the scientific evidence supporting the lone gunman theory has weakened.”