Off The Bus is a project conceived by NYU j-prof Jay Rosen, who runs the citizen journalism site NewAssignment.net, and executed in conjunction with the Huffington Post.

Here's how OJR describes it:

Late last year we told you about the Networked Journalism Summit, an all-day gathering of industry influencers with a collective sight set on a functional juxtaposition of citizen and traditional journalism.

The Huffington Post looks to create that with its new election-season site, Off The Bus, a mash-up digest of feature articles, opinion pieces, polls and videos solicited from a gamut of trad-pub newsies, grassroots bloggers and distributive data journalists. Since its September launch, Off The Bus has been among the most comprehensive pool of election fodder available on the Web, sifting hundreds of daily submissions for insightful "ground-level coverage," as they describe it, of the 2008 campaign season.

It's much more than an aggregator, and this project has some groundbreaking projects of its own. The work-in-progress Polling Project digs behind the scenes of the polls that dominate our spoon-fed MSM election coverage, encouraging pollees to spill the beans on that dinnertime phone call. Also on deck: an interactive map exploring campaign contributions by race and zip code and an exit-poll insider forum for staffers of losing campaigns.

The full article has an interview with Marc Cooper, a j-prof at USC's Annenberg School of Communications, who is the project's editorial co-ordinator.

Addendum

For tonight's purposes, trying to follow the New Hampshire primary online, I would say the NYT or MSNBC proved to be a better use of my time than On The Bus. The H-P home page provided breaking news; however, I find myself perplexed as to why that content wasn't duplicated at the On The Bus homepage.

I particularly liked Katherine Q. Seelye's live blog at nyt.com.