When John Harris and Jim Vandehei left The Washington Post to start The Politico, a political news Web site, both the mainstream and online press heralded it as the latest sign that the end is near. The ship is sinking! The S.S. Print is going down and the good reporters are jumping ship!

But when the site debuted on Jan. 23, it turned out not to be all that different from ye olde media. Their old colleague, Howard Kurtz, wrote his reactions in his media column in The Post:

“[It] wasn’t as jam-packed as I expected, or as colorful, and is rarely updated during the day. In fact, most of what is on Politico.com — and the print version, distributed free mainly on the Hill — could easily have run in an Old Media relic like this newspaper. It strikes me as solid and substantive, but not knocking anyone’s socks off.”

The Politico isn’t all that different from a traditional media outlet. They are funded by a media corporation, Allbritton Communications; they expect to put out both Web and print versions; and they have an old media journalism team, including ex-reporters from the U.S. News & World Report, Time, New York Daily News and, yes, the Washington Post.

I’m hedging my bet that the political news site of the future will be something more personal and citizen driven. Maybe even something like AirCongress.

It’s run by one man, and the main purpose of the site is as a video and audio aggregator written and presented in categorical blog format. Quite a contrast to the Politico in almost every way except for the desire to cover the Capital better than anyone else.

If hyper-local citizen journalism were a sandbox, there would be no king. All of the kids would be purposefully small and scattered. There is nothing to run except the castle you build yourself.

But Backfence was always beefier than most of the children. In May 2005, when it launched, it was surrounded by substantial buzz partly in virtue of its two highly-respected co-founders, Susan DeFife and Mark Potts. Then it raised $3 million in October 2005 from Omidyar Network, SAS Investors, and other investors in the Washington area. Fast-forward to 2006 and there are 13 Backfence communities centered around three metropolitan areas (Chicago, Washington D.C. and San Francisco) and organized into a network.

On Jan. 5, the big kid took a big hit… and everyone in the sandbox took notice. It’s reported that about two-thirds of the Backfence managment staff has left, along with Defife.* DeFife sent this note to Greg Sterling at Screenwerk:

“I wanted to let you know that the management team (Amanda Graham, Bob Kelly) and I have left Backfence. […] Ultimately, we did not share the same strategic vision for the company as the Board of Directors.”

Potts has returned as the interim head of the site. (He had left the management team in late 2006.) “I was still on the board, so it wasn’t as if I had left,” Potts says. “It was an honor to be asked to come back. I am excited by the support of the investors and the board. Hopefully I’ll stay indefinitely. But it’s all happened in the last couple of days, so I don’t really know.”

There’s a lot of uncertainty in the Backfence downsizing story, but those who are watching—i.e. everyone in the citizen journalism community—have been drawing lessons from this past week already.

Secret Radio Project is not a secret. Next April, 89.5 FM WBEW, one of Chicago Public Radio’s three frequencies will begin a completely new and ambitious format. Most of the content will be user-generated.

“What if we had no shows? With no packaged comments?” Torey Malatia, president and general manager of CPR, asked TimeOut Chicago in an interview earlier this year. The answer? Nobody knows.

Without typical hour-long programs, the noncommercial station will instead rely on hosts to navigate two-hour time blocks based on their own musings, but they will be expected to incorporate user audio as well.

The videos that surfaced on YouTube in the past few weeks were disturbing: a police officer tasering a student at a University of California-Los Angeles library for not showing an ID card; an LAPD officer punching suspect William Cardenas in the face. Both videos had thousands of views and sparked a nationwide discussion about the role of police — an especially hot issue for a city still remembered for the 1991 Rodney King beating caught on videotape.

Both of these videos were incidents where the “filmmaker” stumbled across a controversial police encounter. Arlin Pacheco was taping her cats on her porch when she saw Cardenas and the library video was recorded on a cell phone. Yet some are not leaving cop watching to chance and have set up more systematic systems.

Since 1990, Berkeley Copwatch has been patrolling the streets of its California city with video cameras and police scanners to document and deter police misconduct. The group’s methods—community involvement, public education, constant documentation—has parallels to citizen journalism, yet the group has yet to take true advantage of technology and the Web.