Dan Froomkin, who writes the White House Briefing for washingtonpost.com has stirred up controversy at times with his skeptical take on the Bush administration. After Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell called him “opinionated and liberal,” the Post hired a conservative blogger for balance. That didn’t work out, but Froomkin’s daily roundup of White House coverage was more clearly labeled as an opinion “column.” For the purposes of newassignment.net, I was less interested in his take on the White House than on the media; Froomkin was a newspaper journalist who became an early convert to the Internet. (Full disclosure: Dan and I worked on the college newspaper together; I worked in the Newhouse bureau when Deborah Howell was bureau chief. I consider them both friends.)

After working for a decade at the Winston-Salem Journal, Miami Herald, and Orange County Register, Froomkin did the University of Michigan journalism fellowship in 1996, where he decided that he didn’t simply want to cover the Internet, but to work in the new medium. After helping to set up Education Week’s website, he moved to washingtonpost.com, where he worked as a politics producer, metro editor, and number two editor at the site. He recognized one advantage of the Internet over dead tree publications was the utility of its endless digital space. “What attracted me a lot about the Internet was not really the interactivity or the immediacy of it, although I liked those,” he told me. “It was the endless news hole. It was the endless shelf life.” Whereas news stories typically glossed over the core debates going on in favor of some incremental advance, websites could provide the context, an explanation of, say, what got us to the point we’re at in the Roe vs. Wade debate. Excerpts from our conversation follow.

Q: We began by lamenting the rapid implosion of the newspaper industry. How can newspapers - and all journalists - use the Internet to open up their coverage?

Froomkin: The big reason why newsrooms and newspapers are undervalued right now in the Internet age is because they don’t brand them. They hide behind the boring byline.

You look at a newsroom for a good newspaper, and you look at those people, and I think they have enormous value and I don’t think that their value is being effectively communicated and shared with the public through the dead tree edition, through an incremental news story. You have somebody who is a really good beat reporter, and that means they can write a good incremental daily news story – but that really only touches on their talent. So I want a great local reporter to also be sharing his beat-notes: What stories is he interested in, what themes he sees on his beat? I want him to take questions from readers and post them online. Sort of a constant FAQ. I want him to be doing timelines and stuff and doing live discussions and all sort of stuff which would give the reader more access to what this guy knows, also show the reader what this guy knows, rather than hiding behind a byline and a passionless, boring news story.

Q: One question I’m looking at is how to bring some of this openness and verve to the national political/policy story. Washington-based political journalism has always turned on its access to sources who are powerful and/or plugged-in. But open-sourcing allows more access to “real” people – who are, of course, why Washington is there in the first place.

Froomkin: One of the tremendous disadvantages of Washington journalism has been that everybody covers what Congress does, and there’s no sense of what effect it actually has on people. Trying to find a person to illustrate something is very hard. Ideally, in a world where everyone is on the network, you would be able to easily find many people who would be affected by any major bill and have them tell their stories…. I was talking to one woman who was a Neiman fellow a few years ago and did American Indian issues. And to them, Washington had a much more visceral impact on their lives than a lot of people because so much of their lives are controlled by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. But [without that kind of connection] it becomes very abstract, and potentially open source reporting makes it that much less abstract.

“… . What excites me is people telling stories, people telling about their own personal experiences. That’s what I think open source journalism is going to be doing a lot of: letting people tell their stories and finding themes among those stories.

Q: Some people do want to tell their own stories. Look at some of the Katrina-related Web sites. But Katrina, of course, created about a million dramatic personal narratives. Are lots of people eager to tell stories on more mundane issues? If they are, might you get some kind of selection bias, where you get interesting material, but can’t really tell whether it reflects a trend, what’s really happening?

Froomkin: So much that’s happened on the Internet has happened organically, as a function of what people want to do, you’d think this would have happened already if people wanted to do it. So that’s a possibility.

Q: The average newspaper’s default version of “the conversation” is some combination of comments and message boards. But this isn’t a good model. Particularly on political issues, those tend to tip heavily toward, to put it kindly, assertions of opinion. An exception can be a local issue that taps some vein of thought and emotion. One example, you noted, were the protests last year at Washington’s Gallaudet University, the nation’s first university for the deaf. Protestors objected to the choice of a new president, and eventually forced the nominee to step aside. It generated an interesting conversation on the Post site.

Froomkin: I was reading the stories in the paper, and it struck me as a fascinating and important conflict, something with broader implications about America. But the Post’s daily coverage didn’t tell me much about why it was happening – what brought the school to this pass, why feelings were so intense, why it had come to a head now, what it meant for the future of the school, and more broadly, for deaf people in the United States.

It would have been a much better story if you’d have been able to hook up the Internet to the people who were protesting, directly. What was it that made them protest in a way that no students had in I don’t know how long?

Q: If the form is opened up a bit, it offers the chance to influence public policy, bring urgent local problems – or national ones that are ignored – into the debate in Congress and the executive branch.

Froomkin: Imagine if your levee story had been done in an open source fashion. People might have been talking about it, and reading it, and sharing info about it more than they did. It might have made more of a difference. It might have saved your city. … It creates more attention, and more conversation. The tragedy of that series of course was that the conversation, to whatever extent it existed, didn’t go on long enough to affect anything.

Q: On the other hand, the crowd doesn’t always know best.

Froomkin: There’s an old joke about kindergarten. A kindergarten teacher brings a bunny into class, and says, ‘Okay boys and girls, is this a boy bunny or a girl bunny?’ And half the kids scream boy, the other half scream girl, and one kid says, let’s vote! No.

Q: What should newassignment cover? One obvious theme is economics. Washington operates on economic numbers and projections, wielded like weapons by ideological and partisan combatants. You can look more effectively at issues such as taxes and income inequality from the bottom up – through the prism of individual states and congressional districts, the decisions of congressmen, senators.

Froomkin: The story that came to my mind when I was thinking what value regular people would bring to a really important national story is a story that I guess Peter Gosselin at the Los Angeles Times has been doing better than anybody else, which is the whole risk shift. This is really fundamental to the Republican platform right now, which is to get rid of all these safety nets, and get rid of these social insurance nets and turn people into investors, and owners. And for the poor, that comes at a tremendous risk. …The great thing about Peter Gosselin’s story for the Times was that it was based on real people – but only a handful of them.

Q: Looking at these issues through the prism of the Internet will produce some bias in your sample, however, because of the socioeconomic profile of Internet communities differs from the general population. This is where the digital divide becomes a problem.

Froomkin: Look at income inequality. It is the issue of the moment, and a big problem with the Internet as a news gathering device is it doesn’t have a lot of poor people on it. What you need to do is try to get on the listservs of people who run homeless shelters, or soup kitchens…. The most undercovered people in the world are the underclass.

I had a fantasy once – this was when I was in my own little risk shift period – I was thinking of getting a foundation grant to set up a blog for poor people. I would go interview folks at soup kitchens and battered women’s shelters, homeless shelters, and I would do blogs, as told to, just to get their voices in the blogosphere, because they’re not there.

Q: We also talked about the new campaign cycle, the most wired in history.

Froomkin: I have this crazy notion of doing an open source book on issues and politics and having readers help me pick a dozen seminal issues in the 2008 election and help me pick the archetypal positions on those issues – sharing with me why they have those positions – and then at that point doing an actual poll to make it scientific. And then publishing a book saying here’s what America thinks on these issues. What I’d want in this case is not people saying ‘anybody who disagrees with me is an idiot,’ but ‘here’s how I came to this conclusion.’

And I am kind of excited about YouTube in the 2008 elections. I think there’s going to be a million hand-built campaign commercials on YouTube in 2008. But the question is, are they mostly going to be, or the ones that are most popular: ‘Anybody thinking about voting for Hillary Clinton is an idiot,’ or ‘why I became a democrat.’

Q: One interesting change in the YouTube era is that candidates may be digitally recorded any time they appear in public – whether it’s a campaign speech or crossing the street. This used to be true only of presidential candidates – now, as George Allen found out, it applies at all levels. There were a number of video clips last fall that showed some earnest citizen – or member of a hostile interest group – asking questions of a candidate, and the candidate either rudely ignoring them or worse. It came off as rude, or funny - revealing either way. But I wonder if it will chase spontaneity completely off the national political scene.

Froomkin: People make mistakes and people say stupid things that shouldn’t be the end of their careers, and it shouldn’t be blown out of proportion if it’s not relevant. But with Allen, that’s why I think it took off, because it was resonant.