Recently, Jay Rosen and Arianna Huffington announced a new joint venture in campaign journalism, an effort citizen journalism into the mix to counter the pack journalism that Timothy Crouse described in his book, The Boys on the Bus.

I wrote my first comments about it in a blog entry entitled Perspectives in which I wrote,

However, I worry that it might be the same rich white ivy school educated young men that I run into on the blogs and the conferences across our country. I worry that the discourse might end up being not substantially different from the nasty, horse race, Coke or Pepsi type coverage that we see in the traditional mainstream media.

Jay responded over at PressThink, “We’re going to try not to do that, Aldon, because that would be unfortunate, boring and dumb.” Since then, Jay and I have exchanged emails about promoting diversity in the project and I look forward to talking to him face to face about this soon.

Beyond the diversity, there is the issue of pack journalism. I figured I should go back and read The Boys on the Bus, which has helped keep me sane and focused as I fight the latest cold that has been brought home. It is a fascinating read for me as I think about how technology has changed, but the pack mentality has stayed very similar.