Scoop 08.

• Author: Kounalakis, Markos
• Position: THE Monthly INTERVIEW - Andrew Mangino on the online newspaper Scoop 08 - Interview

It's long been conventional wisdom that young people just don't care about politics. Someone might want to tell that to Andrew Mangino, a junior at Yale, and Alexander Heffner, a high school senior at Andover. Earlier in the year, this enterprising pair founded the Scoop 08, a national online daily newspaper dedicated to covering the presidential campaign from a youth perspective. The site, which goes live in September, will employ hundreds of volunteer high school and college students to be the new boys and girls on the bus. Some will be assigned to write about candidates and issues; others will cover less conventional beats, like "rhetoric" or "democracy." The Washington Monthly's Peter Laufer and Markos Kounalakis spoke with Mangino recently about what students care about, why they don't pay attention to the mainstream media, and whether or not the Scoop 08 will make Bill O'Reilly lose his mind.

WM: I understand you are a junior at Yale.

AM: That's right.

WM: And you are also a political reporter at the Yale Daily News. What exactly is it that you are doing with this site?

AM: We hope the Scoop 08 is going to be the first real national daily student newspaper in history. The timing is totally right, the technology is there, and with the election, the interest is there. For the first time students all across the country are really excited about this.

WM: So how are you, as a junior at Yale, going to be the co-editor of this project and not come out with grades worse than George W. Bush?

AM: Over the past month or so, more than 300 student journalists and non-journalists have become really excited about this and signed up.

WM: What are the logistics? How is this going to work?

AM: We have an editorial board of twenty-five or so students from high schools and colleges across the country. Each of them is in charge of a little pod of about five to ten reporters. They direct their content, mentor them, and it works out to be not so unmanageable. You have about one story a day that each editor is working on, and then there's a blog aspect, too, in which you can post quick articles of fifty to 500 words. But the emphasis is on each reporter writing only two stories per month. The stories are edited, and then they go to the managing editor and copy editors--there is a whole slew of people who are helping at that level--and it ultimately is posted on the Web site around midnight or shortly thereafter. We are going to create this nonprofit status...