Amanda Michel: The 21st Century Journalist
July 27, 2008 by Bill Sobel
Filed under People
NY:MIEG events are based on three simple critria: 1) meet new people, 2) learn something new and 3) have a good time doing it! And one of the things I am most proud of is the incredible group of friends and supporters as well as some of the most intelligent speakers and panelists around…and my new friend, Amanda Michel is no exception.
As you might have read, Amanda is working with me, Merrill Brown and Lloyd Trufelman on our exciting event on September 9th all about grassroots techniques use during the current presidential politics and how it adapts to other applications such as media and corporate marketing.
In case you are interested, Amanda Michel is Director of OffTheBus. Amanda started in politics during the 2003-2004 campaign cycle, working as the National Director of Generation Dean and then creating and managing the MediaCorps program for the Kerry-Edwards campaign. Along with several other Kerry-Edwards coworkers she helped co-found the New Organizing Institute in the wake of the 2004 election. Since then she’s taken her online organizing skills to media, working at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and on Assignment Zero, a Wired and NewAssignment.net collaboration.
Amanda along with her team at OffTheBus were recently highlighted in a fascinating article in the NY Times entitled “Off the Bus, but Growing Thousands Strong.”
I thought you’d find it of interest.
-Bill
The New York Times/nytimes.com
July 23, 2008
On Line
Off the Bus, but Growing Thousands Strong
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
OffTheBus.net, the online citizen-journalist arm of the Huffington Post, celebrates its one-year anniversary this month.
Of all the new political, non-candidate sites to spring up during the last year, OTB is now probably the biggest, with 7,500 citizen correspondents. Through its growing pains, it continues to develop the technological and organizational know-how to become a force in journalism even as it challenges the standard notions of traditional journalism.
We have been charting the site’s progress throughout the campaign, with a report in October about its start-up and an interview in April with Mayhill Fowler, the correspondent who gained notoriety after reporting Senator Barack Obama’s “bitter” comments from a closed fund-raiser.
The site has evolved in several different ways. Perhaps most strikingly, OTB’s total of 7,500 citizen correspondents is up from 300 a year ago. Arianna Huffington, who helped found OTB, attributes the dramatic rise to the buzz created by Ms. Fowler’s two big scoops, first the Obama comments, then in early June when Bill Clinton lashed out at a Vanity Fair writer.
The scoops created news and also prompted intense self-reflection among traditional journalists (it’s all about us!). Had Ms. Fowler successfully pushed the envelope for campaign reporting? Or had she so fractured the rules that she set journalism back? Either way, she has become a rainmaker for OTB, the modern-day equivalent of Woodward and Bernstein inspiring hundreds of young cubs to become investigative journalists.
“The numbers started going up with Mayhill, then they accelerated,” Ms. Huffington said. “She became the poster child for ordinary citizens being able to impact the campaign.”
These vast numbers of fresh recruits give OTB an even greater capacity to undertake the kind of projects it originally set out to do, particularly the so-called “distributive” or “collaborative” kind of reporting in which the work is distributed among many different contributors.
Amanda Michel, the 30-year-old director of OTB, is the organizational brains behind this growing army.
That’s an apt description of the outfit she oversees. Ms. Michel was born at Ft. Benning, Ga., and grew up on various Army bases, the daughter of a Green Beret in special ops and a Dutch mother who now teaches French. She has brought that very nomenclature to OTB and, among her many innovations, has started a “Special Ops” section with its own logo. Special Ops, OTB style, is basically an intelligence-gathering operation, which deploys citizen journalists to sweep up information in a systematic way. The results may yield breaking news or simply help OTB build its data base on the campaigns.
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