Good idea!

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about Washington Post staffers, John Harris and Jim VandeHei, leaving the bastion of political journalism for the world of the online, with a big budget and some (supposedly) serious talent behind them.
Jay Rosen interviewed Harris for PressThink and asked him, what's so revolutionary about this new Allbritton-financed adventure?

Jay Rosen: You guys said Allbritton was sold on your “non-traditional”
approach to news from political Washington. What traditions will you be breaking
with to produce it, and why would you depart from them?
John Harris: I have long puzzled over a phenomenon about many reporters, one that I am sure is true for me also. They tend to be more interesting in conversation than they are to read in the paper. I think one reason for that is that the typical newspaper story continues to be written with a kind of austere, voice-of-God detachment. This muffles personality, humor, accumulated insight—all the reasons reporters tend to be fun to talk to. When it’s appropriate—not in every story but in
many—we’ll try to loosen the style and in the process tell readers more about
what we know, what we think, and why we think it.

This is, excuse the language, fucking fantastic. In all the commentary and criticism and guessing about how to save the news in this new media world, so few people look at the actual journalism - the reporting, the writing, all of it. It's refreshing to see someone talking about changing the way we do things on a basic level.

As far as what Harris was talking about, I absolutely agree. The right calls the media out on its "liberal bias," so reporters and editors push even harder for objectivity (not to mention things like the Jayson Blair debacle, which some are still recovering from psychologically). As a result, most stories turn out so dry that even if they're about something really important - how contractors are wasting millions on unfinished projects in Iraq, for example - a reader doesn't get the sense of the importance. There's no outrage on behalf of the reporter, and for many that means there's no outrage for the reader. But being pissed about something like that is not, I think, bias. It's perfectly legitimate and, provided they have all the facts, there's no way someone could say it's biased.

Anyway, way to go Harris. I said it before: I hope this works.

When horses fly.

Pegasus (pegasusnews.com), another experiment in user-oriented content management on a news site, launched this week out of Dallas, Texas. The general idea is you sign up and Pegasus tracks which stories you click on. (Most of which are hyper-local.) Once it gets enough information (how much is enough, I'm not sure), it starts listing stories you might be interested in. If you read a lot of stories about a certain school, say, or lots of restaurant reviews, it'll list those stories first in their respective sections. Also, you can register in a certain neighborhood, and Pegasus can start directing you to those stories immediately, without gathering info about where you click the most.
It seems like a good idea, and the people down in Texas compare themselves to Amazon's book and music recommendations, except with news. Plus, the layout is inviting and simple. Layouts at other "cutting-edge" news sites, like Digg and the Fort-Myers News Press, are cluttered and look somewhat sketchy, as if viruses are lurking behind every link. Those turn me off immediately; I just want to get away from those sites as fast as possible. But Pegasus is lovely. The site uses bright colors and big buttons on the top for each section: Metro, Business, Living, etc. The top stories are listed along the left, by section (this is, I imagine, where "The Daily You" stories will be); on the right there's a calendar, a list of today's events, and the latest user comments - interspersed with ads, of course.
But the news content itself is a lot of fluff. Well, not fluff per se, but the stories are very short, often written in first person and often riding the coattails of reporting done by other Dallas sources. The news stories come off more like blog posts, and I'm not sure that's what Pegasus is going for.
Also of note: no news video on the site, but several of the ads come with YouTube spots. One, for a new "healthy" Dallas-brewed beer, is a local newscast about said beer. Another is a dramatic video of a "laptop deathmatch" party at a local bar for New Year's Eve. These aren't really short, either; the deathmatch one lasts a minute and a half.
Also, a banner ad on the site encourages people to register for The Daily You feature, because, "all the cool kids are doing it." The graphic is a cartoon of two teenagers; one is smoking, and offering a cigarette to the other.
Hilarious.
(On a sidenote, I can't seem to get links up correctly, so if you're interested, you'll have to poke around yourself.)

die Podcasten.

Earlier this year, German Chancellor Angela Merkel became perhaps the first head of state to begin addressing her country through video podcasts. The three-minute spots are available weekly, and according to the government's press office (according to Wired Magazine), are downloaded 200,000 times a week. That's decent, even if the spoofs on YouTube have an equal (or greater) following.
What I found interesting about Wired's story is this quote from a critic of the podcasts, democracy analyst Sascha Kneip:
"The real target group isn't people under 35 [the people who podcast] but journalists and professional observers ... It's a way to set the political agenda."
True. But isn't that the way political rhetoric works? When our own dear President G.W. Bush makes a speech at an Elks Lodge in Minnesota, or a farmers' convention in Kansas, his "real target group" is not the few hundred or thousand people in front of him. Sure, he wants their support, especially in an election age when every vote very literally counts, but he's speaking to a much bigger audience. Sound bytes will be picked up by broadcast stations; quotes will be scribbled in notepads by the print journalism set. Hell, Bush might even get a spot on YouTube. Those bytes and quotes might be aired on the evening news or appear in the next day's paper, and of course will be available all over the Web -- but if it's not a major speech or prime campaigning time (and if the president doesn't do anything extraordinarily dumb, like the door fiasco in China last year), those bits and pieces will probably only appear where political junkies and reporters will be looking. So whether Bush's speech to a bunch of Rotarians in Maine hits the mainstream media or, more likely, just the people with a vested interest, he's speaking to more than the Bangor Rotary Club and he's indeed setting a political agenda.
So Merkel may be pretending to talk directly to the German people, when really, she's just talking to the Berlin insiders. But so what? All politicians do it, and have way before video podcasts came around.
Speaking of which, when will we see the W. Podcast? I wouldn't hold my breath, not with the YouTube crowd waiting, poised, to mock him six ways to Sunday.