A Human Voice Covering an Important Event Up Close for Those Who Are Far Away

Alexandra Starr writes about the excellent Talking Points Memo in the "Year in Ideas" issue of The New York Times Magazine. (Because URLs to all the articles in the issue use the same format, you can use Technorati to watch links to any of the articles in the issue.) TPM isn't really the greatest example of "open source reporting", though the community site for the weblog, TPMCafe might qualify. Better examples are NowPublic, where people who sign up for an account can submit text, audio or video of news events if they have them. But really anybody with a weblog can contribute and participate in journalism. To me, "open source journalism" isn't as interesting as "open journalism", since it has less connotations with software development (and therefore geekiness) while still retaining the ideas that anybody can do it and that it can include original reporting and/or commentary.

An excellent recent example of this is Betsy Devine, who recently attended the trial of some minor Republican operatives but which might have significance for American national politics as a whole. Josh Marshall is also on the case, and has linked to Betsy's site if not the articles in question. Since she doesn't have a category for the series, I'll link to the first article and you can read up from there. (Readers of my site in aggregators: I'm a little nostalgic for those days when we read weblogs "backwards", not as if they were emails in a three-paned window, but only a little.) She quotes as best she can, as there were no recording devices allowed inside the courtroom, and links to articles written by the commercial press to help fill in some blanks (or to point out the blanks in their coverage). Not perfect by any means, but still someone with a human voice covering an important event up close for those, like me, who are far away.