News on Patch/Huffington Post front: Our Patch editors in New Hampshire broke the story of Romney’s son telling a birther joke to finish out 2011 last week, and we have big plans on Tumblr in 2012:

• Across the country, HuffPost’s citizen journalism operation OfftheBus will be monitoring the “OfftheBus” tag for citizen journalism to reblog and promote across Huffington Post. If you create any original election reporting on Tumblr—a picture of a flyer you see, the scene from an Occupation, a video of a speaking politician—we’ll do our best to make your reporting as viral as the birther joke was.
• OfftheBus Iowa, an aggregation of some of the best shortform reporting from the Hawkeye state, is in the final sprint. Two more statewide efforts in SC and NH are following right behind it.
• In Wisconsin, the just-launched Recall Central Tumblr will have the best reporting on the effort to recall Governor Scott Walker. Patch editors have been beating the competition for months, and now they have a statewide hub to build an audience around.

If you have ideas about how we could better use Tumblr to cover the elections hit me up on the Reply, please.