From NYU Journalism School’s Pressthink site comes a very interesting story from Jay Rosen. A non-partisan coalition of reporters is coming together to collectively investigate Congressional earmarks.

It’s a brilliant idea, because it’s what the web does well. Here’s the opening salvo:

Today marks a key moment in the evolution of the Web as a reporting medium. The first left-right-center coalition of bloggers, activists, non-profits, citizens and journalists to investigate a story of national import: Congressional earmarks and those who sponsor and benefit from them.This is networked journalism (“professionals and amateurs working together to get the real story”) beginning to come of age, and it’s very much in the spirit in my initiative NewAssignment.Net.

Check out the site. It’s chock-a-block with links to all kinds of interesting stuff.

GO READ

For whatever reason, over the past week or so I’ve seemingly read nothing but stories about urinals. First, on Sunday, this little gem about a snappy bucket-shaped number called the Pale Ale Urinal.

As well, a Dutch McDonald’s restaurant found itself at the centre of a controversy after public outcry forced it to remove a set of mouth-shaped urinals.

From there, I started trawling the world of urinals with a greater sense of urgency. Urinal.net is a seemingly endless gallery of user-submitted urinal pics, including this top ten list.

Not on the list was this one, found in a Turkish tailor shop.

Please enjoy responsibly.

For all those folks who think that user-generated content is somehow the future of broadcasting, let me suggest that this video represents a rather chilling vision of things to come.

Just watch