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.

One of my concerns with the growth of netroots politics and Internet enabled citizen journalism has always been whether we will simply replace on set of consultants, one set of journalist, one set of the power elite with another. The Internet has the potential greatly facilitate this. Bloggers, campaign supporters and others can, and do, form mailing lists to coordinate their actions. The cohesion and common message, developed by journalists rubbing elbows on the bus is perhaps, being mirrored by bloggers and campaign supporters rubbing virtual elbows on mailing lists.

As an outsider in Junior High School, up to being a pariah to some of those mailing lists of today, I’ve always questioned how beneficial such packs really are. This has been brought home with the coverage of the incident between a suburban mother and the Critical Mass bicyclists in San Francisco. Josh Wilson has an interesting email to the Media Giraffe Forum about this, looking at the coverage and the discussions that have occurred on the SFGate run blog. He addresses the issues of packs, or crowds, or whatever you want to call them with

There are also some interesting lessons one can learn about the Web 2.0 medium, which seems to balance, not always evenly, between "wisdom of the crowd" and "seething mob of pro and con flamers."

How do we extract the wisdom of the crowd from the seething mob of pro and con flamers? After my trip to the Journalism that Matters and National Conference on Media Reform gatherings in Memphis, I wrote a blog entry entitled, Are bloggers Group Psychotherapists?.

It seems as if the question of extracting the wisdom of the crowd may be part of this ‘sense-making’ that everyone tells me new journalism is supposed to be about. Will we see new packs of bloggers along old packs of journalism? Will this give us a wider perspective and enable our sense-making? Should we be trying to prevent new packs from forming? Are there other ways of extracting meaning from the wisdom of crowds?

I’ll be struggling with this a little bit at the New England News Forum Conference on Saturday. I’ll be struggling with this as I talk more with Jay Rosen and others. I look forward to hearing more thoughts and ideas on this.