Meanwhile, back at the ranch ...
I'm trying to write a story, but our main publishing system is down. While I try to write a draft in Word and also try to get some reporting done on other stories, I'm also taking note of what's going on around me. Well, except for looking over the shoulder of Taft Wireback in the next cube. He's a former Golden Gloves boxer, and I do not want to rile him.
First, the Braves' starting rotation appears to be in good shape. I have not heard as much about the team's bullpen. This concerns me.
Then, two pieces of news related to big efforts in what open-source journalism:
- NewAssignment.net, the Jay Rosen-led experiment, has launched. You'll find information there about the overall mission and goals, as well as a way to receive an info newsletter and, if you want to participate, a place where you can go to get an assignment. Other links include one where you can contribute story ideas. It's having some minor tech problems related to start-up, but go anyway.
- When the House Judiciary Committee released something on the order of 3,000 documents related to the firings of several U.S. attorneys last night, I'm not sure how long it thought people would take to go through them for the "good parts." Bloggers Josh Marshall and Paul Kiel, who run TPMMuckraker.com, have a history of open-source journalism by pinning down, early in 2005, most congresscritters' public positions on Social Security privatization. Around 1 a.m. today, Kiel wrote, "Josh and I were just discussing how in the world we are ever going to make our way through 3,000 pages when it hit us: we don't have to. Our readers can help." The comments show how quickly 1) they set up a mechanism for readers to contribute with a maximum of verifiability and a minimum of duplicated effort -- and how quickly readers started getting past the filler to the substance.''
Finally, as to House investigations of the firings themselves, this bit from the U.S. News & World Report blog The News Desk:
The Justice Department now says the document dump will contain closer to 2000 documents. [That figure predates the actual, larger dump.]"You have no idea," said one Justice official, "how bad it is here."
The fear that virtually any piece of communication will have to be turned over has paralyzed department officials' ability to communicate effectively and respond in unison to the crisis, as has the fact that senior Justice officials themselves say they still don't know the entire story about what happened that led to the crisis. So they are afraid that anything they put down on paper could be viewed as lies or obfuscation, when in fact, the story is changing daily as new documents are found and as the Office of Legal Counsel conducts its own internal probe into the matter.
That high-pitched squeak you hear is me playing the world's smallest violin.
Open government, folks. It works from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and Capitol Hill right on down to 16 W. Jones St. in Raleigh and 300 W. Washington St. in Greensboro.