no, I don’t think this is “”networked” journalism quite the way it’s being talked about around the blogosphere. This is a kind of “citizen journalism” that is *not* hyperlocal–the kind of citizen journalism that informs citizens and gets them talking about issues they might have overlooked.

Networked journalism, from what I and many others are beginning to understand–has more to do with finding stories, researching them, and then investigating. What’s gone on here is citizens (albeit rather high-on-the-totem-pole citizens) brining information to the people that might have languished on a back page somewhere, and the seeing conversation develop around it. This is promoting civic discourse in the new town square of the internet.

And it’s probably a good thing to keep the two–networked and citizen journalism–separate. One is still an experiment, the other something that’s been going on for a bit. To quote Len Witt:”If we remove the words citizen, public, civic from the equation, it will be too easy to forget that this is about public, civic, citizen participation. This is not just about helping news operations to get a free staff or even developing better coverage, it’s a way of getting an engaged public to help build a bigger, better and stronger democracy.”

With nothing ‘new’ to report, the MSM had to abandon the story, while politico bloggers could keep examining (and over-analyzing) it. After all it was bloggers that gave the story legs for the two weeks its been since Coburn’s office pointed to Stevens.

Perhaps its the role of the blogosphere to flog the dead horse until someone finally notices, and that’s okay.

I don’t think so.

This is why they need term limits. Why more people aren’t clamoring for them is beyond me.

What about Senator Pat Murray, D-Seattle, who has proclaimed,

“I tell my colleagues, if we start cutting funding for individual projects, your project may be next.”

Humans will never be able to stop pols from wasting money that isn’t theirs. This is precisely why we have to starve the monster every chance we get (that means tax reductions).