When it comes to the debate around health care, you've heard the same voices of pundits and politicians repeated on the morning and evening news.  You've seen a small group dominate the airwaves by shouting and spreading lies at town hall events.  You've even seen guns at presidential events enter the fray.  But have you seen your personal health care story told?  Or that of your friends, families, co-workers, or neighbors?

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This week CNN launched iReport, a video sharing citizen journalism site where users have a chance to upload reports which might be picked up and used on-air at CNN.  The launch builds on previous experiments by CNN to incorporate citizen journalism into its reporting.  The site is technically in beta now, and is slated for launch in March.  I should also mention that CNN is hardly the first network to stumble across the idea of citizen journalism: The Real News, a non-profit progressive TV news show, has been supporting citizen journalism through their community website The Real News Junkies for several months now, with a significantly lower budget.

iReport is, as might be expected, far from perfect.  TechCrunch has already taken it to task for failing to compensate contributors and for relatively lackluster content.  In many ways, iReport is really just a shadow of YouTube, with the main difference being that iReport submissions have the chance to be picked up by a large international TV network.  CNN does provide a few helpful hints on the type of video that has a better chance at getting on air: stories about presidential candidate sitings, salutes to the troops, and severe weather.  At least they're not setting the bar too high.

I'm curious to see whether this site could become an entrypoint for progressives to push news coverage on CNN further to the left.  I'm under no illusions that Bill Bennett will have his racist keister ejected from election night coverage, nor that Lou Dobbs will join a mariachi band and issue a teary-eyed apology for his hate-mongering past.  I'm fairly positive that CNN will start off by deciding which stories it wants to run, and occasionally turning to iReport for cheap footage that reinforces their predefined point of view.  But eventually, I'd like to hope, a deluge of reports with a leftist bent - hearings on global warming, let's say, or personal testimonials that indict the health care system - will encourage story editors to adopt a more progressive slant.  Such a deluge would be an incentive for the network to offer substantive, progressive news by lowering the cost of doing so.

Or, we could watch stories about ketchup.

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(cross-posted at dailykos)

Check out this new online search tool we are offering to the progressive community: It's called ThinkingBlue Search (http://www.thinkingbluesearch.com), and it is a google-powered custom and focused search engine.

ThinkingBlue Search is currently covering about 470 web sites, including:

every major progressive blog that discusses politics and policy (over 200 of them and adding more daily), every major progressive think tank (over 40 of them), every major official Democratic web site including every single local State party website (about 70-ish of them), every major liberal political journal and magazine in print and online (over 25), most of the major progressive syndicated columnists (right now just over 20 and growing), most of the progressive watchdog groups (also about 20 at the moment) and lastly, it also searches the early progressive political wikis that exist (about a dozen or so).

..and we're adding sites daily.

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With the increasing interests in video blogging here on MyDD, I wanted to bring to the attention of the readers a very interesting Vlog - Alive in Baghdad. It is produced by a team of independent Iraqi journalists and an a group of American web/video people who post and run the vlog. The videos give an insight into the daily lives and struggles of Iraqi people, and provide a nice citizen-journalist alternative to most sources of news on Iraq.

(cross-posted at Daily Kos)

A couple days ago, I posted about a new blog I am starting with the help of others. It's called Progressive Wave, and our stated goal is clear: we will be blogging about, in the form of primarily citizen journalism with some traditional blogging (hard to make it down to Washington, D.C., for example), our new representatives and senators in Congress. As of right now, we have people who will be blogging for us in the following districts and states: AZ-08, PA-07, PA-08, CA-11, KY-03, NY-19, NY-20, and VA-Sen. We have had others express interest in IA-01 and CT-02 as well, but I do not have concrete commitments for them. Even if your district (or one you'd be interested in) is already covered, please feel free to blog for us - the more we can spread the load around within a district, the better it works out for all of us.

Below, you'll find a general description of what Progressive Wave is all about. I hope you can help us out. Thanks!

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