Today, young people across America launched Scoop44.
President Barack Obama made generational change and young people, together, the very centerpiece of his campaign. Now his Administration must find ways to continue to engage those millions of young Americans who participated at unprecedented levels this election cycle. No substantive method yet exists, but Scoop44 fills this void.
Scoop44 follows the same innovative Web-based model of its predecessor, Scoop08, to report on the Obama administration, national politics, and public policy from a fresh generational lens. The Website is uniquely poised to address the surge in political activism and interest among young people.
Hailing from colleges and high schools across America, from Harvard and the University of Chicago to Ohio University, Arizona State, and Washington University in St. Louis to public and private secondary schools nationwide, Scoop44's staff will venture into territory traditionally left ignored and unreported.
With writers on a myriad of specialty beats, including all facets of Washington, the heartland, race in America, academia, and new media and technology, Scoop44 will deliver substantive stories through multiple mediums and engaging new platforms, including feature-length articles, blog updates, email alerts, editorial digests, video reports, and live online chats with reporters.
Scoop44's journalism will reveal the new political, cultural, and societal phenomena of 2009, unearthing underreported, even undiscovered, news. We are poised to follow this generation and to usher in a new age of political reporting for readers young and old, inside and outside of the beltway.
Unlike any existing media outlet, Scoop44 will probe particularly into how new policies relate to and affect the nation's future and young Americans holding accountable this young administration. By drawing on the resources of incisive young minds -- and by focusing concertedly on the new administration, its policies, and its impact on a rising generation -- we will venture into territory that neither the mainstream media nor any other outlet can explore with equal vigor.
The election of President Obama, a demographic and an electoral sea-change, coupled with the rise of the Internet, a vehicle whose power is being harnessed with the greatest innovation by young people, means that more and more politicians recognize the importance of connecting online to this new generation of Americans. The interest generated already by the 44th President and his new administration is extraordinary -- and the media in turn has provided early and aggressive reporting on this watershed moment in American history. But with enormous concerns facing the new President, mainstream outlets are stretched thin.
Meanwhile, there is a demographic more energized and with more at stake in the next four, if not eight, years: America's young people. Thanks to the opportunities presented by the Internet -- online journalism, blogs, networking websites -- a new generation, for the first time ever, has the chance to band together for the common purpose of reporting in-depth on the administration.
Our mission is to channel our energy -- and to use it for good.
Here's a clip of me discussing the project on CNN's "American Morning" with John Roberts: