Tired of linking to other people's work? Find your own scoop!
Over at the Huffington Post, White House Watch journalist Dan Froomkin just linked to a goldmine for citizen reporters to explore over the next few months. Congress has begun posting reams and reams of Oversight Committee transcripts, giving journalists of all stripes a peek into the controversies that group hears every day. Here's a list of transcripts.
The kicker is that most overworked print journalists don't have time to comb through this gigantic archive. As Froomkin writes: "The legendary Washington Post investigative reporter (and fellow Nieman Watchdog blogger) Morton Mintz once told me some of his best stories came from sitting all the way through congressional hearings that other reporters had already left." This is a great chance for citizen journalists to find a scoop buried in congressional testimony.
If you're looking for more political inspiration, check out the Sunlight Foundation. They released a web application that allowed a web community to perform an act of community journalism, sifting through the financial records of 435 legislators in a few days.
It's a great project, generating some cool data about how online communities work. Check it out here.