I wrote last week about our new audio features, including The Breakdown with Christopher Hayes. We’ve added a partner on The Breakdown: Professor Jay Rosen’s great new project, ExplainThis.org. ExplainThis.org is "a user-driven assignment desk for journalists doing explanatory work." Readers go to ExplainThis.org, ask questions they think aren’t being covered, and the questions are sorted, ranked and then answered by experts and journalists. The Nation has been involved in several efforts over the last year to crowd-source some of the questions posed to those in power: We partnered with Personal Democracy Forum on their "Ask the President" effort, and I’ve been involved in the effort to make the President’s "question time" a regular event.
In our partnership with ExplainThis.org, we’re taking it a step further–offering the wisdom of our DC Editor and the platform of our new audio feature, The Breakdown, to users at ExplainThis.org. They have set up a page for the project that you should all visit– ExplainThis.org/TheBreakdown. The idea is simple: Some of the questions Chris will answer each week will still come from Twitter and email. But others we’ll take directly from ExplainThis.org/TheBreakdown, where users can engage in some discussion about the podcast each week. I hope you’ll check it out.
This week’s The Breakdown is an important one. Chris, along with blogger and journalist Marcy Wheeler, look at the architects of the Bush-era torture memos and ask if anyone, anywhere, will ever be held accountable. Listen here:
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Also this week:
Keeping Up with StudentNation…
We saw this week that Huffington Post has launched a "Campus" vertical, so it seemed as good a time as any to draw some attention to our StudentNation program. Launched in 2006, StudentNation has grown steadily since. We have a student blog and newsfeed; aggregate stories and news from campuses around the country; highlight Nation stories of interest across the country; and publish winners and entrants in our student journalism competition. Offline we partner annually with Campus Progress on a regular Youth Journalism Conference.
If you’re a student yourself, or you want to keep track of campus, college and youth politics I encourage you to revisit StudentNation, and to bookmark it, tweet it, send it around and remind students and others what a great resource it is. It’s TheNation.com/ Students.
Reliable Sources on CNN Sunday …
The healthcare summit is over, but how did the media cover it? I’ll be on CNN’s Reliable Sources with Howard Kurtz on Sunday morning to talk about the optics of the reform summit and who covered it well. It’s Sunday Morning at 11 AM nationwide.
Democracy Now Features Sebastian Jones …
Our cover story from February 11, The Media-Lobbying Complex by reporter Sebastian Jones, exposed some of the "double agents" of cable news–commentators who are also paid lobbyists. Last weekend the story was featured on NPR’s On the Media, and this past week Democracy Now kept attention on "The Media-Lobbying Complex." Here’s video from the program:
Slideshow: Civil Rights in The Nation…
In honor of Black History Month, The Nation assembled a collection of articles from the magazine’s archive dating back to 1865 about the struggle for civil right. We present them here with an accompanying slide show featuring some of the most important benchmarks in African-American history.
That’s all for this week. As always you can follow me on Twitter, or leave comments and questions below.
