Introducing Ledger Live, a new kind of news show

Monday at noon, we’ll launch a noon newscast on NJ.com, hosted by veteran Star-Ledger reporter Brian Donohue.

Let’s make one thing perfectly clear from the outset: This is not local TV news.

This is local video news for the web. It’ll be conversational, interactive and draw constantly on the community of users at NJ.com and bloggers, vloggers and podcasters across New Jersey.

It’ll be live, and we’ll make our share of mistakes. Watch today’s final test episode, and you’ll see what I mean:

Note to self: Unplug Brian’s phone before going live again.

But occasional bloopers aside, we hope the show can bring people into the newsroom each day for a quick take of the day’s top news, a dose of some good video stories, and a sampling of comments and contributions from viewers. As we go forward, we hope viewers will play a larger role in suggesting stories and helping report them.

Here’s a little more about what we’re trying to do:

And here’s a little bio piece on Brian:

The show will be streamed live at noon on our blog each weekday, then offered in an embeddable player for viewing whenever. Each day’s show will also be broken into its component parts: links to the top stories Brian mentions, separate embeds for the videos in the show, and so on. You can watch the whole show, or just a select bit.

It’ll also be plugged into a number of social media platforms. For now, you can follow Brian on Twitter, join the Facebook group (app coming soon) or hop into our FriendFeed room.

The show is about six weeks in the making, and it follows on the heels of the video boot camp run for our staff by Michael Rosenblum in May. The video stories for the show are produced by our 20 staff veejays, who work in all departments of the newsroom.

Here are a few more samples of their work:

For us, this is an exciting way to combine the reporting of our newsroom with the power of video and the web — and to find new ways to bring the people formerly known as the audience (thanks to Jay Rosen for that phrase) into the process of making what was formerly known as television.

Take a look and please let us know what you think.  We’ll listen and take your advice, just as we did with these thoughts Amy Gahran shared with me on Seesmic a while back when we were first noodling with this thing.

We launch on Monday. Fingers crossed…