Allen WeinerAs I scour the fruited plain of the web, I am spending much of Election Day reviewing media websites (with an emphasis on newspapers) looking for common threads in how they are covering this possibly historic day. Toss print out the window; this is a web election. It’s doubtful the majority of U.S. newspapers will hit their print deadlines in time to make even the latest home delivery window. It will be no different then when newspapers east of the Mississippi attempt to report sports scores from night games on the west coast. As a kid, I used to hate when I opened the paper in the morning only to see “Phillies at Los Angeles (late)”
If you were to benchmark the 2008 election coverage against the 2004 coverage, you get the impression that these digital media babies have indeed come a long way: Crisper layouts, use of video and photos and poll tracker widgets abound with a smattering of social media overlays to allow folks to comment as if they were venting on talk radio. Some papers are using Twitter to show off their microblogging skills and some such as the Washington Post and Austin American-Statesman are hosting live chats to fulfill their mantra of being community information hubs. I noticed on Mogulus that the Rocky Mountain news is streaming live (although I couldn’t find a link on their website) and both the Guardian and Telegraph from the UK are producing video clips that rival anything coming from network news.
But, at the end of the day, my take is that in general newspaper efforts to capture the essence of the election—the voice, the soul, the historic significance—is outdone by one of the best citizen media sites, Now Public. Len Brody, Now Public’s eloquent and quotable CEO says, “Now Public is a vestibule that represents people’s thoughts on the election…We analyze large scale conversations and focus on news as it’s spoken and as it’s seen.”
Now Public offers a news media recipe that blends technology with common sense in a way that most metros just don’t get. Would any major newspaper be daring enough to put up a pre-beta version of a cool application such as Now Public’s scan which mines, in real time, conversations from leading microblogging communities and allows users to rate and recommend them with the best ones highlighted and geo-located on an interactive map. While most newspaper grapple on how to implement user generated content, Now public has built a strong workflow that includes professional editors and skilled volunteers as well as general community members who, in Wikipedia editing style, ensure high content quality.
As I continue to drill down into Election Day coverage, I am beginning to believe that newspapers are just taking too much old school baggage with them as the attempt to reinvent themselves as possible digital/web-only content providers. As the ink beings to fade for the nation’s newspapers, perhaps there’s a lesson to be learned from Now Public’s success: audience and community first—everything else second.
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Category: Newspapers Web 2.0 blogging citizen media social media Tags: citizen media, Leonard Brody, Now Public
