Unveiling the Political State Report. Kos from The Daily Kos has the project up and running pretty damn amazingly. Yours truly is so far the only correspondent covering Illinois so if there are any Republicans or independents or just others out there (besides those stalking horses in the Harold Washington Party), drop a note to Kos and start contributing. I’m working on my first entry which will probably get posted over the weekend. Subject: Indictment Season in Illinois.
The site is quite ambitious. Kos is trying to gather bloggers on state politics from every state in the union. From those correspondents, articles on the political machinations of the state will be written hopefully with more context than typical national reporters are capable of delivering.
For my other beloved states, the ever capableThomas Spencer will be covering Missouri as will newcomers to me, David Barnes and Adam Case. Adam already has a good article up on the shift to a Republican Legislature and potential candidates for Governor. Tom discusses five counties suing the state for revenue decreases.
Iowa is uncovered–come on someone out there has to be able to talk about Iowa politics. I’m sure David Hogberg can be drafted upon his return, but what about the rest of you out there. With the caucus season starting this should be essential material.
For a fuller description, MyDD posted this:
Political State Report
Daily Kos has created a website, Political State Report, which has the bodacious potential to become not only a top-tier political website, but one that surpasses anything yet done on the web that deals with political campaigns and elections.
I wish to encourage many of the long-term posters here to e-mail Kos and join up to submit entries on the blog. Kos explains the conception, with which I concur:
Over at my weblog, I quickly found that the best insight this past election cycle came from locals sharing first-hand information on developments in their backyards. Sure, the information was often colored by partisan biases, but even that was better than the "unbiased" tripe spewed by the national media. So, the Political State Report was conceptually born.
When Kos first mentioned this a couple of months ago, I urged him on. The only caveat was that it would be one heck of a load of work. He’s up for it though, and the end product is stellar. It’s like stateline.org, but with a more ground-based viewpoint, and even further niched. Those Outflanked Democrats Wondering How to Catch Up in Media Wars could catch a serious clue from what Kos has developed.
What Kos has done is to extend the most valuable part of what went on here during the 2002 cycle; which is just fantastic, especially considering how the terrain is currently shifting.
The only serious impact that CFR seems to have, is shift the monetary funding epicenter from DC to the state political machines. This will have many repercussions, and it’s tough to tell what the end result will be– it probably differs from state to state. But as far as campaigns and elections go, one result will be that the DC-based pundits whom rely on the DC-based party structures for information, will become further removed from the action. This will be in tandem with the state party infrastructures gaining a much stronger presence in federal elections.
If Kos can manage the spectrum of contributors with an steady keel, while upping the quality of informed contributors, PSR ought to be able and ride the crest of this shift in power, empowering grassroots political reporting in a way it’s never been broadcast before– this is the kind of stuff that the internet was born for accomplishing.