Speaking of citizen-journalism ...
Via Jay Rosen comes word of the first nationally organized effort at "distributed" journalism: an examination of Congressional spending "earmarks," pork-barrel spending tucked into the Labor/Health & Human Services appropriations bill.
A coalition of news organizations, nonprofits and individuals will be trying to track down the source of every one of the 1,867 earmarks in the bill -- each with an average value of $268,000.
That's a lot of pork. And that's also just one appropriations bill out of about a dozen Congress must pass every year.
Rosen has background at his blog, PressThink, here. And if you want to get involved, you can. From an Examiner editorial on the project:
Check out the earmarks for your state and then call your congressman and ask if he or she sponsored any of your state’s earmarks. If the answer is yes, ask why the congressman’s name isn’t on the earmark. If you recognize the institution designated to receive the earmarked tax dollars, call them and ask them what they intend to do with your money.Then email us at info@examiner.com with the subject line “Earmarks” and tell us what you found out. The Examiner will be asking more questions about who got the earmarks and why, so your information could be very important. You will be part of an army of citizen journalists determined to shine some much-needed light on spending decisions made behind closed doors by powerful Members of Congress.
Your grandchildren, whose national debt will be smaller as a result of this work, will thank you.
UPDATE: Because the last time I looked at a state budget in any detail, was back in the Stone (i.e., pre-computer) Age of 1991, I asked our Raleigh-bureau reporter, Mark Binker, whether this approach would work with North Carolina's budget. Here's what he said:
Lex:
I would say no for a couple reasons:
- Earmarks in the state budget don't come about like federal earmarks do. Once the budget gets fairly close to a final draft, you know they're there. The exception are the "slush-fund" earmarks of those a few years ago, which aren't enumerated anywhere. A federal earmark, as odd as this sounds, is ensconced in a committee report that's not part of the main legislation that gets signed into law. (Yes, that means a lot of earmarks COULD be ignored, but they seldom, are.)
- In this year's budget there's no question of who sponsored what. Raleigh legislators had to put their names to the pork they requested in the form or separate bill filings...it made writing about pork up front easy...and at the end of the day they didn't get a lot of pork this year.
But he did have some thoughts on what else we might apply this to at the state/local level, and we're going to explore that subject in more detail.
UPDATE: Ed calls it The Boston T-1 Party, which is great except that it's not really based in Boston. I guess if it's based anywhere, it's the Examiner newspapers' D.C. bureau, but then on this medium, physicial location is so 20th-century ....