ExplainThis.org and The Breakdown

ExplainThis.org and The Breakdown

A new partnership gives you another way to get your questions answered.

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By now you’ve likely noticed the barrage of banner ads here at TheNation.com for my weekly podcast, The Breakdown. We’ve been doing it every Friday for two months now, sometimes with co-stars (Marcy Wheeler this week; Ryan Grim of HuffPo last month) and sometimes just me and my extremely dedicated intern Lauren. I started The Breakdown because I wanted to get into podcasting, but also because I thought there was a real hunger for explanatory journalism among Nation readers.

I wanted to put in a plug, then, for our new partner on "The Breakdown," ExplainThis.org. Started by Professor and Media expert Jay Rosen at NYU, ExplainThis.org bills itself as "a user-driven assignment desk for journalists doing explanatory work." Basically, it’s a new model of how readers and citizens can get their tough questions answered by experts and journalists. They’ve been cool enough to create a separate page for The Breakdown. Go to ExplainThis.org/TheBreakdown, ask your politics or policy question, and the wheels start turning: questions are reviewed, sorted and ranked by the community of ExplainThis.org readers; then the most relevant and popular get answered.

What this means for The Breakdown is that there are three ways you can suggest the question I’ll tackle each week:

1 – Tweet it, to @chrislhayes, using the hashtag #thebreakdown

2 – Email me, thebreakdown [at] thenation [dot] com

3 – Ask me and a community of dedicated news-hounds and truth-seekers, at ExplainThis.org/TheBreakdown.

I’ll shake it up and take different questions from different places each week. But through those three channels, what we’re trying to do is get a sense of what you want answers to. A special thanks to Jay and ExplainThis.org, who have put in a lot of work to set up a page where you can ask a question, but also have a real discussion with me and a whole community of site users.

In case you missed it, here’s the latest The Breakdown with blogger and journalist Marcy Wheeler, about the torture memo authors, and whether or not they will ever be held accountable:

The Breakdown is posted each Friday at TheNation.com, and you can listen right here or subscribe in Itunes. Bloggers can also embed The Breakdown on their own sites.

Let me know any questions (or topics for this week!) in the comments.

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Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editor and Publisher, The Nation

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