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. K. Danny Glover, the creator and only editorial member of AirCongress as of now, wrote in his mission statement:

“AirCongress is the online voice of Capitol Hill, the one place where people can go to hear and see the latest news of, by and about Congress. Much of the content here is directly from lawmakers themselves — the video clips they post from floor debate, the podcasts they create on various topics and more.”

K. Daniel Glover has been in the D.C. area for 16 years as of this month, and he has editorial experience in both political journalism and online journalism. He started out with the Congressional Quarterly, where he worked on the BillWatch database—a forerunner to the database journalism happening today—and was thus introduced to online journalism. He is currently the editor of the National Journal’s Technology Daily and also blogs about the impact of political blogs at Beltway Blogroll And now, of course, he’s the one-man operator of AirCongress. His previous work in the online field—and the political journalism field—inspired him, but he is quick to stress that AirCongress is as much a reaction to politicians realizing the potential of Web 2.0.

“What you started to see in the last election—especially on YouTube—was the impact of audio and visual content on politics and political campaigns,” Glover said. “Each candidate was making their own videos and podcasts. […] I found them to be not useful in and of themselves, but if you could pull a lot of these together on one issue, the that could be helpful.

I could pull several podcasts on Iraq together in one post so people could listen to it.” And Glover has already started arranging his posts by category to make the site easy to navigate as a database. You can search by state, issue, representative, 2008 presidential candidates and more. And his coverage of the State of the Union—putting together blogger responses on the right and left, along with official Congressional videos and audio—is another good example of his use of categorical aggregation.

“AirCongress is a portal in the sense that it is one place you can go to find content all about Congress. But it is also a filter through that portal. With my Producer’s Picks and Podcast of the Week, I’m telling you that I’ve been here for 16 years, and that’s what I think is most important right now.”

Personal Democracy Forum did have some good criticism for Glover and the site, namely, that it’s only his voice right now. There isn’t an opportunity for people to contribute themselves with their own content. (Readers can comment on every post, however.) Glover is aware of that problem.

“I want it organized in a journalistic fashion. But I need to realize that my knowledge and experience isn’t everything.” In an echo of Dan Gillmor, Glover said, “There are people who do know more than me, and I want their content on my site.”

One project he would be interested in doing that would generate content is partnering AirCongress with journalism schools across the country so that local j-students can do audio interviews with local Congressional representatives about hot-button issues. “Think about an issue like minimum wage,” Glover said. “You could compare the different impacts it has across the country, different perspectives.”

He’s also interesting in banding together with other small political web site operations. One such operation, the Capital Hill Broadcasting Network, is a YouTube-like site for members of the political community to upload politically-related videos.

Of course, for now, AirCongress is just a one-man project competing against the likes of the Politico. But they serve different purposes, and in many ways they represent different worlds. “I look at the Politico, and they have a Web 1.0 approach. I lived through that. You spend money, do a lot of marketing, get a lot of attention, get a lot of big names, get a lot of buzz, and sometimes that works.” It should be interesting what works in 2007.

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Matt Weir is a student at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. He writes a media criticism blog for Medill and edits the news at Tinymixtapes.com, an online music magazine.