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Crowdsourced Election Coverage

Knight 2007 News Challenge Winner

What with the nonstop drumbeat of presidential campaign news these days, it's easy to forget that we've actually got some other elections coming up.

On Feb. 5, primary voters in Chicago will cast ballots for ward committee leaders, the county's chief prosecutor and a slew of other positions.

From my point of view this is an interesting deal, because I've never run a news organization's election coverage before. I'm always the guy who comes in afterwards to do the big project on voter fraud. Which is a good thing, because I can't plan my way out of a paper bag.

It's also fascinating because we've got an enormous opportunity to use our crew of 30+ citizen journalists to cover the election in nifty new ways.

Leave a comment or drop me a line (geoff at chitowndailynews dot org) if you've got ideas.

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2 comments so far, Add Yours

 

I know it's a little late now, but perhaps for future elections, it might be an idea - you could also monitor the online presence of the parties running for office??

A sort of dashboard if you will, of online presence, covering number of results on google, yahoo, in blogs, in the news, the alexa ranking, the technorati ranking, etc.. comparing the key candidates. It would have been interesting to capture them throughout the process, to see any clear siignificant shifts, if they existed.

 

So ... how'd it go?

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