Midwest Politics

I came across MidwestPolitics.com via our friendly neighborhood online news outlet, MinnPost.

With crucial nomination contests approaching in Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Ohio, and the 2008 presidential election now less than 10 months away, six independent political and government news sites from across the Midwest have teamed up to launch MidwestPolitics.com.

The site is a cooperative venture between sites based in Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin. Its goal is to provide readers with background and coverage of the crucial Midwest battleground in the months leading up to the 2008 presidential election.

To back up that "cooperative" claim, the contacts for various MidwestPolitics features and info come from different participating sites.

One site per state, so MinnPost is the only source from Minnesota. They're filtering out all the non-political content. At the moment, all it's doing is aggregating content. No additional analysis.

There's no RSS feed for all the headlines. You have to actually visit MidwestPolitics to see the aggregated news. Or else drop the feeds from each participating site into your feedreader. You have to dig a little at MinnPost to find the politics feed. It'd be nice if MidwestPolitics at least included the feeds from the sites it's aggregating if it's not going to publish one big one.

Notably missing is Indiana. I don't know if its because there's not a suitable online publication willing to participate or Indiana's not "crucial" enough or what. Makes for a nice snaggletooth midwest map, though.

So if you live in the Midwest (except for Indiana) and you weren't sure what your best source for your state's non-partisan political news is, check these out. MinnPost and the Gongwer news sites for Michigan and Ohio are full-on news sites, whereas the Wisconsin, Iowa, and Illinois sites are politics-only.

For the record, that there map (including Indiana) is, in my opinion, the correct map of midwest states. Don't be tryinna lump Missouri and the Dakotas in there.