In April 2004 Zack Exley, my boss and John Kerry’s Director of Online Organizing, tasked me with my first sizeable project. “Figure out a good way to organize supporters nationwide who want to interact with the media. You know, letters to the editor, calls in to radio programs, blogs, etc.. Make sure you can quantitatively measure the project’s success day to day.”

The assignment couldn’t have been a better match. Zack knew I was intensely interested in new media developments and that, more than anything else, I liked the challenge of doing something for the first time. Before joining the Kerry campaign I worked on Howard Dean’s campaign as the National Director of Generation Dean, the campaign’s official youth outreach effort. I volunteered to the Dean campaign believing I would spend most of my time stuffing envelopes, mailing material, and doing research. Just weeks after I started, my boss Zephyr recruited me to organize students for Dean. When she became a member of Dean’s fledgling Internet team a month later, it was as if I did too.

Organizing students included new tasks, like setting up a webpage and maintaining an email list. Few people on the campaign had web skills and those who did were too busy to do my work. To meet my deadlines, I taught myself. By the time the campaign ended, I had learned to code emails and webpages, design websites and tools, architect database structures, and organize volunteers.

Keeping up with innovation on the edges proved far more exciting than pursuing a graduate degree in Philosophy. Believing that I’d reached basic competency with the medium, I wanted the opportunity on the Kerry campaign to experience changes happening in media.

Two weeks later I launched the John Kerry Media Corps. The program revolved around a weekly assignment. Early each week I emailed members an assignment, such as writing a letter to the editor about Bush’s impact on the economy, and they completed the assignment by the week’s end. The next week I reported back on our successes, including where and how many letters-to-the-editor had been published. Once we established our weekly ritual we began varying our focus, asking members to contribute to blogs, share their stories with the campaign’s local press teams, and to participate in local forums.

Within weeks the project took an unexpected turn as I found myself and my project at the mercy of the press.

MediaCorps members emailed me about their frustrations with their local publications. “My newspaper forum is poorly monitored. Not a single reporter appears to belong.” “The letters I email to my newspaper are published nearly a week after I send them. No one who reads the paper is going to remember the article I responded to.” Not everyone was dissatisfied with their local media. The more advanced and cutting-edge their publication, the more advanced and varied some MediaCorps members expected our assignments to be. “My newspaper links to regional bloggers. Why don’t you ask us to start blogs? They could create a lot of attention for MediaCorps members.” “I’ve been published so much that the editor told me he won’t publish any more of my letters for a few months. What else can I do? Isn’t there some other way to discuss the election?”

Any imbalance between the nature of our assignments and the opportunities found locally to interact with media came at a cost. Bored by writing letters, some members graciously excused themselves to start blogs. Others accepted positions as local reporters. Some people gave up on their local media altogether and began participating in newspaper forums in other states. To maintain interest and equity among our members, I tried to tailor our assignments to a region’s media. If members reported a newspaper as inaccessible, I didn’t link to it as often. In areas where bloggers were more influential than the press, I organized people to reach out to bloggers.

Despite MediaCorps great successes as a program, the project depressed me. I saw firsthand that public discourse requires a publicly accessible and accountable press. When newspapers did a poor job conversing with the public, MediaCorps members grew despondent and disinterested.

Following the election, I sought out ‘answers’ from new media practitioners and scholars. In the first week, I read Dan Gillmor’s “We Media.” Shortly thereafter I began visiting Jay Rosen’s “PressThink” and the Greensboro News-Record. I puttered around online, comparing and contrasting newspapers’ features. Several months later a Dean campaign advisor forwarded me a job posting for the Berkman Center. The Berkman Center was home to new media visionaries like Rebecca MacKinnon, David Weinberger, Ethan Zuckerman, and Jake Shapiro and was one of the few centers I found that required its employees to actively engage new media. Inspired to learn about and experiment in the emerging media ecosystem, I applied for the job and moved to Boston to work as the Berkman Center’s Communications Director. (BTW, if you are interested in new communications work, the Berkman Center is currently looking to hire someone to replace me.)

When Zephyr pinged me about NewAssignment.net, I knew I needed to get involved. What I like about NewAssignment is its focus on bridging the divide between the public and the press, so that the two can work in tandem. There have been a great many developments over the past two years, but few I think will have such long-lasting impacts as changing the working relationship between people and reporters. I’m honored to work on this project and excited to contribute my online organizing skills to the cause.