A good day for new media in Illinois…

…Even though Illinois had a pretty bad day. Selling a senate seat? Really, Rod? You even knew you were being monitored by the Feds! One would hope someone with enough brains to wrangle his way into the governorship would also have enough brains not to sell a senate seat while being monitored by the Feds. Apparently that is not the case.

I wonder who Blago will bring down with him. Emil Jones? Jesse Jackson, Jr.? Jan Schakowsky? We soon shall see. The corruption was deep and widespread. Blago is the tip of the iceberg.

Now for the positive spin. Yes, we have indicted yet another governor. Yes, the Tribune filed for bankruptcy yesterday, putting yet another nail in the coffin of traditional media and raising fears of an even less transparent political system in this corruptest of corrupt states. Scary stuff, and sad.

But amid this mess, some journalists did some great work. They deserve recognition.

First, mad props to the crew at the Windy Citizen. Cool things they did include:

• Live tweeting from Patrick Fitzgerald’s press conference
• Creating a page where Twitter tweets about Blagojevich or Fitzgerald updated in real time
• Designing a visual guide to the indictment. The format: a word cloud

The first two especially were quite informative and inventive. I found them much more useful than the Trib or Sun-Times’s coverage.

Second, mad props to Medill’s new media project team for launching newsmixer.us, a social news commenting site that fuses Facebook Connect with a pretty, easy-to-use website to engage young people with local news. Newsmixer has the potential to create interesting and lively conversations around news. The team built three commenting functions. All have character limits and all require a user to sign in with their Facebook user names. The software could eliminate anonymous meanness and annoying diatribes in one fell swoop.

Newsmixer was built for the Cedar Rapids Gazette in Iowa, but it’s open source and available for download now. Ryan Mark and Brian Boyer created the software. Both are programmers who are at Medill on a scholarship made possible by a Knight News Foundation grant. The Newsmixer project shows how essential it is to teach journalism to programmers (and vice versa).

More journalists should be doing what the folks at the Windy Citizen and the Medill new media project have done. How cool is it that anyone following the Windy Citizen’s tweets could get brief, real-time updates on the Blago indictment? How great that, in just 11 weeks, Medillies created a platform that could truly transform newspaper comment boards and bring web 2.0 to local, traditional media? Very cool.

If the Tribune folds, we’ll replace it with something better.