My name is Will Urquhart, I'm the Communications and New Media Director at Main Street Insider (MSI). Before I describe what this group is all about, I want to first introduce who and what MSI is. Our core contributors include David Waldman, Jeremy Koulish, Mitch Malasky, and myself. You may know us from our 90 Second Summaries or because you've watched a House or Senate committee livefeed on our Committee Dashboard. You might have watched our video of "Chairtoddler" McHenry calling Elizabeth Warren a liar during a House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee. Or maybe you've noticed that committee schedule buried at the bottom of This Week in Congress. What we aim to provide is INSIDER reporting from an OUTSIDER perspective. I've included our more substantial "about us" info below the fold in case you want to learn more.
We formed this Daily Kos group, Main Street Insider, to not only present our unique form of Capitol Hill coverage, but also to create a platform we can use to crowd-source the monitoring of what happens in Congress. If you regularly write about what happens on the floor of the House and Senate, or in their respective committees, we want to hear from you. To start with, we are asking folks to include "Capitol Hill" as a tag when applicable. We will be monitoring that tag's feed and republishing material that we think fits with our purpose, is accurate, and is worth sharing.
We are still developing exact guidelines for how we will decide who gets invited to be an editor. For now, the editors are David, Jeremy, Mitch and myself, and it will require a unanimous vote from all editors to invite others.
We at Main Street Insider will post from now on under personal accounts. We never liked posting as faceless entities from our MSI account. Most of us have had personal accounts here for years, we've built relationships with people here and it just makes sense for you to have a clear idea of who you are talking to when you comment in one of our diaries. So, we are dropping the DK account in exchange for a group.
The following is from our "About Us" page on our website.
Statement of Purpose
Ours is a time of great disillusionment. Public support for institutions of all types is at abysmal levels, and there is a widespread sense throughout Main Streets all across the nation that America is in danger of losing its way. A major reason is that average citizens have become frustrated with the excessive influence of wealthy and entrenched interests in Washington. Those who do wish to participate in the political process often feel that nobody is listening inside the Beltway, and they lack the information sources with which to compete on a level playing field with the K Street professionals and cocktail party circuit. Working at such a disadvantage, they are largely marginalized from the policymaking process during the most important stages of formation and deliberation.
There are currently two prevailing formats for insider political coverage. The first, exemplified by outlets such as National Journal, CQ, The Hill and others, is designed for paid advocates and other Beltway professionals, people who are deeply immersed in the political world. The information from these sources is comprehensive, timely....and far too expensive for the average citizen to access. It also generally fails to provide introductory explanations and definitions for those less familiar with the minutiae of policy and legislative process. The second format, that of traditional network news, approaches political coverage as if talking to a fifth-grade audience. Due to biases stemming mostly from the profit motive, these entities focus almost exclusively on partisan talking points, fail to cover basic policy details and perform simply fact-checking, draw false equivalence between various viewpoints regardless of merit, and rarely offer a platform to those deemed a threat to the economic interests of the network's parent corporation.
Clearly, if an engaged citizen wishes to obtain reliable plain-language information on the everyday happenings of Congress, neither of these formats will adequately suit his or her needs. Main Street Insider plans to serve this unjustly ignored constituency with a new type of insider coverage. It will provide a combination of policy basics, exclusive reports and hard-hitting interviews directly from the corridors of power, background information on legislators and the legislative process, and concrete avenues for citizens to engage with their government.
Our mission is based on one fundamental premise: more robust participation in the legislative process by informed and engaged citizens will directly lead to outcomes that enhance the common good.
By consistently focusing on the bigger picture, tying themes together when warranted and asking the often common-sense "next question", we cover matters of the day in both a more contextual and more accessible style than other insider news outlets. Furthermore, we harness the interactive power of the internet to shape our coverage and questions for political leaders around the needs and interests of our audience. Most Capitol Hill coverage features one-way communication and allows very little room for interactive participation by the audience, save the screaming matches that ensue in the comments section of some websites. We will use cutting-edge, interactive online tools that allow our audience to take the conversation further, to ask the "next question" themselves. Main Street Insider should foster a sense of community, a place where viewers can look to each other for answers and advice. Evidence of the power of crowdsourcing has been seen in tools such as the "citizen whip count", allowing grassroots advocates to emulate the process used by congressional leadership and lobbyists to gauge support for a proposed measure. We plan to build upon that framework and leverage the wisdom of crowds in a way that maximizes our readers' collective impact upon the debate.
Who We Serve
Ultimately, we operate in service of the larger causes of participatory democracy and the overall health of the American polity. That said, we aim to create a product of use to engaged citizens, policy professionals, grassroots advocacy organizations and Capitol Hill staffers. We plan to work with representatives from each of these communities to maximize the value-added of Main Street Insider to our customers. We also will build a diverse Board of Directors that incorporates viewpoints from each aforementioned demographic group.