By Matt Chiappardi, Staff Writer
It was MSNBC anchor Keith Olberman who estimated that the average readership of the more than a billion blogs floating somewhere on the World Wide Web is one.
But that bleak statistic didn’t deter Hightstown High School graduate Jean-Baptiste Cossart from attempting to cull what he and his new business partners think are the most poignant of them together into an online news source.
The East Windsor native is one of the creators of TheIssue.com, a Web site that launched in July and is an amalgamation of previously posted blogs that comment on international news events.
The content on the site everything from Hugo Chavez’s political reforms in Venezuela to the military rise of China or the recent declaration of martial law in Pakistan can be found on more traditional Web-based news sources such as the BBC News site or CNN’s Internet extension. However, Mr. Cossart says his Web site goes one step further, giving his readers the opportunity to experience world events from many more perspectives than a traditional journalism venue can offer.
If, for example, a place were to flood, he said, “We’d be providing a view from everyone, to reporters who are covering it, to someone who is experiencing the flood firsthand.”
”We’re not looking to displace publications like The New York Times or CNN, we’re looking to provide something different,” he added.
That something, he says, is a quick way for readers to grab all the pertinent information on geopolitical events with a “clean tight package.”
The site has a sparse design in a genre that is often crowded by pop-up advertising and other intrusive graphics. TheIssue.com uses a plain white background, black text, and a lime green logo Mr. Cossart has dubbed, “Issue green.”
And in addition to news content, the site also offers, arts, cultural, and literary blogs.
The strength of his site’s strategy, he said, is that no text is published in-house. Every story that appears on TheIssue.com is linked to a previously published post somewhere else on the Web.
”We take advantage of the full blogosphere,” he said.
”Other sites have a writing staff, so you’re generally getting information from a particular perspective.”
This Thursday’s top story reported on the federal Supreme Court hearing arguments from detainees held at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba. The page links to the SCOTUS.com blog site that covers and analyses the court’s proceedings.
Other linked blogs include one maintained by former Green Beret Michael Yon, who complies soldier stories from the frontlines in Iraq. Thursday, The Issue.com linked to his commentary on the rebuilding of the infrastructure of that war-torn nation. And there’s a linked piece from the CATO Institute’s blog about the emergence of Peru as a democratic market economy.
And their “issue of the day” Thursday the viability of corn ethanol as a fuel for automobiles compiles views from a self-described watchdog site called “The Swine Line” that calls the ethanol issue “a lot of hot air.” It also links to a blog site called worldchanging.com which compares the current dialogue on ethanol to the dust bowl crisis of the 1930s.
That formula is what Mr. Cossart said will allow his site to stand out among the rest of the clutter in the online world, including Web-exclusive-based content like Slate magazine and Salon.com.
Mr. Cossart and his two full-time partners, along with a six-person part-time staff, don’t use any special software to crawl the Web looking for text markers. Instead, Mr. Cossart and his partners, who all live together in a Brooklyn, N.Y. apartment, spend hours trolling thousands of blogs looking for pieces that will fit.
”We look at ourselves like newspaper editors, and all the bloggers out there are our reporters,” he said.
Copyright issues are still difficult to decipher online, but so far Mr. Cossart said no one has complained about his or her piece linked to his site. In fact, he said, most are pleased to have yet another link that could help augment their own advertising revenue.
If, however, an author were to request a piece be taken down, Mr. Cossart said he’d do so immediately.
The idea for the site was born when Mr. Cossart graduated from Cornell University in New York a year ago. The 23-year-old was an economics and political science major who said he became fascinated by “trying to understand the different ways human beings interact on different levels.”
That was augmented by his experience growing up. While he spent most of his life in East Windsor, his parents are French. They would normally take him back to France for about a month each year to visit family, he said.
”That experience is probably what opened my eyes to the larger world,” he said.
After graduating college, he and his partners emptied their savings account to start TheIssue.com. Mr. Cossart mostly takes care of the business and financial side of the project. His partners attend to the technical design and content area. But as a small business run out of a Brooklyn apartment, they all take turns working on everything.
The Web site is still young, and has yet to make a splash in the cut-throat online world where fads and brands can rise and fall in fewer than 24 hours.
Mr. Cossart won’t reveal the amount of hits the site’s gotten since it has gone live. His aspiration is to jumpstart an advertising campaign in January that he hopes will make his brand’s name as much of an Internet institution as Amazon or YouTube.
”It’s a race against time. If we don’t come up fast enough, there will be no chance that people will look for us or even find us,” he said.
In the meantime, the partners eat, sleep and breathe their new online business the same way other innovators, such as Thomas Edison, did a century before them. And not one detail goes unnoticed.
A few weeks ago the trio repainted the walls of their apartment.
When asked what color, Mr. Cossart proudly answered, “Issue green.”

