Shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, everyone was talking about the need to defend our democracy. The U.S. Capitol had also been an al-Qaeda target that day – and it seemed our way of life, our very freedom was under attack.

Sometime in the weeks that followed, I got to thinking about our democracy: most people don’t even know who their Congressman is, let alone what they do all day here on Capitol Hill, or how the deals and decisions made in the corridors and committee rooms of Congress impact directly on them. Voter turnout was at historic lows and people were clearly disengaged from the political process.

Was this because they found politics boring? Irrelevant? Or because they thought they had no influence in a system where lobbyists and special interests have appreciably more clout with lawmakers caught in a perpetual dance of fundraising? Or was the answer partly about the way politics was being covered?

To many, politics was just noise … a lot of shouting by Beltway insiders far removed from Main Street realities. Reporters covered politics like a boxing match: who’s up, who’s down, who’s out for the count. Much of it was irrelevant to people’s daily lives.

So what could I do? How might changes in the way journalists cover Capitol Hill spur citizens to become more interested and active civic participants? Was there a way to make political reporting more relevant … to bring politics ‘home’ with reporting on the issues that hit home, would it empower folks to become more active in our democracy?

I wondered why local news organizations no longer had reporters covering Capitol Hill. Shoe-leather investigative journalism is expensive, but if I could find a way to make it affordable for, say, public radio stations, might there be a market for coverage that focused on the local impacts of national decision-making?

Capitol News Connection began in late 2001 as an idea on a single page of paper. “All politics is local,” I had scrawled in illegible handwriting, and soon Tip O’Neill’s old saying became my mantra. I started doing some informal market research: I called all the public radio news directors I knew and asked them whether they would be interested in coverage from the Hill – localized for their listeners. The answer was overwhelmingly “yes” – but only if they could afford it. Public radio is not exactly rich, but it was clear they would pay for something that was consistently accurate, unbiased, engaging, relevant and exclusive – all custom-crafted to their own listener needs. I set about creating a hyper-efficient business model that supported hyper-localized custom content at low cost. Eight years later the CNC 'secret sauce' has yet to be replicated.

I also believed that there was more expertise outside the newsroom than in it. Citizens should be asking the questions, not just reporters. I settled on the idea that citizens and professionals should collaborate, and the result was Ask Your Lawmaker. It launched in 2008.

Now I am on to my second company, a mobile "crowd-reporting" platform that takes my earlier CNC thinking and model - and puts it on steroids!

NewsiT won the WeMedia Pitchit! Challenge in 2010. The idea was that smartphones are the newsrooms of the future. We would partner citizens with professional journalists, and add a 'game layer' (no not Angry Birds for news, but reward, recognition and fun) and algorithms to pattern data, weight contributions and optimize accuracy and quality of user-generated content.

NewsiT is still in beta, and it has now closed its first small funding round. As it sprints towards the launch of its iPhone and Droid apps, it acquired Ask Your Lawmaker. We have big plans for Ask Your Lawmaker: mobile apps, video and much more!

This story has many more chapters...