Four hours. Four newsrooms.

The end of the 2008 election season wrapped up a piece of my online obsession - SmartDecision08.com. Along with helping keep that site running with content from KOMU.com, KBIA.org and the ColumbiaMissourian.com I also decided to turn the partnership up a notch and produce a multi-newsroom webcast. We ended up also including a new internationally-focused newsroom called Newsy.com into the webcast as well. So for four hours we worked with content from four newsrooms and conducted interviews with participants in a big non-partisan watch party we created to coincide with the webcast. It was pretty fantastic to be able to combine multiple newsrooms AND the community all into one event. I'm proud of the dozens and dozens of people who helped make the event happen. I'm exhausted from it all still. I actually had to run out of town the very next day for family reasons so I haven't been able to truly digest the many things we were able to do since SmartDecision08.com launched a year ago. I don't want to see the site die - so I have to come up with ways to let it continue to grow even without any funding. The great thing about RSS feeds is the content continues to flow, so I'm trying to conceptualize a way to help the website follow political news and issues even if I'm not overseeing it often.

In the meantime I'm about to go halfway around the world to train some journalists in China. I've never had this kind of opportunity before and I am excited and nervous to go. I'm planning to spend some quite, focused time preparing for the trip. When I get back, I hope to spend more time digesting and sharing the lessons learned from the SmartDecision08.com project.