The following is a message that I’ve sent to various friends, reformed into a blog post. I hope it will help all of you get a greater sense of where I hope to see citizen journalism going, as it relates to the Edwards campaign and beyond. It captures some of my thoughts about how we as OneCorp participants can help change our country through our writing.

I am participating in a Journalism That Matters conference in Memphis later in January. As part of the prep work, participants have been asked to interview each other. Below, you will find my answers to the questions asked. As you read through them, it will help give you context of some of my journey to where I am now in supporting Sen. Edwards. It will also help give more complete context to my blog post about the first blogger meet and greet I attended with Sen. Edwards back in October 2005. (Details of that are here).

With that, Happy New Year everyone. 2007 is going to be an exciting year.

1. Each of us has been engaged with at least one media story that we experienced as particularly effective; a story that had great productive impact; in other words, a story that mattered. Tell me about a story you were involved with or were touched by that comes to mind. What made it such a powerful experience? What effect did it have on its audience? What effect did it have on you? What made it possible to do?

Gina Coggio was a schoolteacher in New Haven Connecticut. She wrote for the New Haven Independent, an online hyperlocal news site that is well worth reading. It was September, 2005. I was working as the BlogMaster for the Mayor of New Haven who was running for Governor. Part of my job was to find good blogs where I could write comments to direct people to the campaign blog. Unfortunately, I cannot find a copy of the story that Gina wrote, but I do have my personal blog post which quotes part of the story. You can see the post here.

Here is the important excerpt:

Today, I read Gina Coggio’s latest posting. Please, go out and read it. She is a teacher who has students writing vignettes about their lives. One started off, “My father chose the drug life over his children… He was a crack head whether I wanted to believe it or not and as the days went by I seen more in him. He’d begin to take things that belonged to us to get money for what they call a habit, but I call it evil. It took the loving sweet man out of my father and turned him into a wild fiend… Every time I saw him I seen death. His pale white face, crusty lips, ragged clothes and his body sank in. He was a skeleton.”

It made me stop and think. It sort of puts all the issues of political campaigns and webpage formatting into perspective. I hope that Gina’s students continue to find their voices, perhaps even have a blog, and more people hear what they have to say.

What made it so powerful? I think it was the raw realness. I read news reports about the children of crack addicts. They've been sanitized, made fair and balanced, and lose all their flavor.

What effect did it have on me?

I blogged about it. I encouraged other people to read it. I commented on it over at the New Haven Independent, and Gina responded. We corresponded and I visited her class when they put on their student productions. I spoke a lot about hoping that her students would continue to write and find their audience. I encouraged her to get some of her students to blog, and in the end, she decided to set up a blog where each of her students would put up their best work of the year. I went and visited her class and talked about blogging and the importance of their writing. You can see the students work at http://literatureatnha.blogspot.com/

Have any of these students gone on to be great writers? I don't know. I sure hope a seed was planted for some of them and that some of them go on to be writers that bring about social change.

2. Without being humble, what do you value most about yourself as a contributor to great journalism? What gifts do you see yourself bringing to this meeting?

I had a discussion with Bill about a possible citizen journalism gig that I might get. I mentioned that I am a college drop-out; no training at all in journalism. Instead, I'm a computer person. I love to write and I love to use the computer to get my message out. Bill suggested that my lack of a journalist's filter might end up helping me immensely on my task. So, I guess my ability to write with a different filter and to get the message out online may be the two gifts that I bring.

3. It is safe to assume that we all believe that journalism is essential to democracy. Given that is true, what is it about journalism without which it would cease to be journalism; what is its essential core? What are we ready to let go of?

Heart, soul, a story that grabs you and won't let go, a story that changes you, the way Gina's story and the story of her students changed me. What am I ready to let go of? All the false pretenses of balance, fairness and objectivity. First, they are false. We all have biases. Let's admit them and let the reader compensate accordingly. More importantly, they eat away at the very heart and soul of stories that change us.

4. What three wishes do you have for the future of journalism?

Virginia Woolf, I'm told, once said there was only one thing wrong with privilege, it is that not everyone has it. It is a privilege to be able to write a good story and to get people to read it and to react. It is too bad that too few people have that privilege. I can't reduce this to three wishes, but I think you get the idea.