Where the *John Howard* is that link Gandhi promised?

OK, it's here. Stop your bitching, people. Get a life.

I'll even give you a blockquote:

My goal is to have a cluster group of all-stars with high quality interaction with upper class undergrads, grad students and bringing in writers from outside that we care about. The interactions with the news organizations would have to be close and early. We wouldn’t dump it on their lap at the last second.

Newsrooms are being substantially shrunk, and the ones who are left are ready to jump out a window because they have too much to do and too little time, or they think they’ll be fired next week. Those newsrooms desperately need content, and the students would be thrilled to have those clips.

The goal isn’t to have the students be the mainstream media’s outsource mechanism — that’s not what I’m trying to do. What I’m trying to do is investigative journalism that has resonance with hopefully hundreds of millions of people. The web can do that with the wonderful viral effect, but if I can utilize the old-fashioned transition media, then I’ll get the best of both worlds and get people who are on the web and those who aren’t.

Say "thank you gandhi".

SAY IT! DAMN YOU!!!

UPDATE: Maybe co-opting unpaid undergraduates for content is a good idea for a startup but you will have to move from there to full-scale professional operations pretty quickly if you wanna keep the dream alive. You gotta take them grads with you! And that might be kinda hard if Obama wins the White House, right?

I mean, stocks in Outrage.com are gonna sink damn fast. Those grads will be looking at paybackmyloan.com and cashincredentials.org pretty fast. You gotta compete for their attention, which is notoriously short. Damn kids! I blame the parents!

UPDATE: Even more from that link:

The gatekeeper model has deteriorated very badly. We still have elite media that did not get the memo about not being gatekeepers anymore, and still try to control stories. We still have Scott McClellan’s book ending up on page A19 of the New York Times. The idea of a press secretary to the president of the United States dissing his president about a war and his truthfulness was not deemed important enough for page 1 of the New York Times… That is beyond ridiculous but it is also not surprising.

We are at a very strange time in history where the gatekeeper is eroding and will morph into some other form that will be influential with news organizations down the road, but there are tens of millions of other places you can get information.

Oh really? Where? This blog, for instance? I can't do it on my own!!!