Checking out USC's new news operation

NeonTommy.com at USC Annenberg is an "online digital news Web site created to fill a void in local and national news while providing news and commentary across multiple platforms—audio, video and text." It's guided by Marc Cooper, late of the LA Weekly and Huffington Post, but student managed and edited. Co-editors Brian Frank and Chris Nelson are graduate journalism students. The top stories at this week's launch include pieces on the Obama inauguration, Ann Coulter and Australia's fires, and local stories on the mayor of Long Beach, moving off Skid Row, a crackdown on unlicensed handymen and an investigative report on the 4,705 unclaimed bodies piling up in the Los Angeles County morgue. I'll be interested to see what the sites does through the semester with so many student reporters available. Cooper says the ambitions are to grow into a full-on digital news operation that fills holes in local coverage left by the shrinking news media, especially the L.A. Times. "We aim to put Annenberg on the map of local journalism," Cooper tells me. He recently got the title of director of Annenberg Digital News. During last year's presidential campaign, Cooper (who blogs here) oversaw the Huffington Post's Off the Bus team of citizen reporters.