In fact, the insider games is what they do know best. Who is ahead, who is behind, who is running the best campaign, who is running the worst campaign. But when it comes to presenting issues in the same stellar way they are lost. They either just don’t have the reporting intellectual capital, enough people to gather the information or maybe they just lack the will.

However, with all the new graphic devices, the power to crunch numbers, the money they spend on the pundits, they really could tell those complicated issue stories in ways that would make them interesting to everyday folks.

My guess is someone will figure it out, just as Joshua Micah Marshall has done with TalkingPointsMemo. Or as Nate Silver and Sean Quinn did with FiveThirtyEight. Their site was by far the best horse race handicapper in the campaign. In just nine months this unknown dark horse came out of nowhere and broke away from the pack in the home stretch.

There is a must-read article at WWDMedia about how Quinn and his photographer Brett Marty traveled 14,000 miles by car and visited 14 states and maybe 100 field offices. They understood the campaign in ways that few reporters flying around in campaign airplanes could.  Although Quinn was openly a supporter of Obama, his reporting about the bottom-up ground game was enlightening.

Now what if someone figured out how to make the issues like health care, the broken prison system,  the economy and international relations just as interesting. Just one person with a good idea could make it happen. All the tools are there. Look at the resources all waiting to be tapped and assembled: graphics, video, slide shows, commentary, feature writers capturing the human drama, investigators digging for the dirt and low cost ways of spreading the word. It can happen, it should happen and when it does happen it will save quality journalism.

• First point to remember. Blogs are simply a blank piece of paper. They can be used any way the blog publisher wants to use his or her blog. They can strive for truth, for example, PolitiFact, a project of the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly, which parses ads for how truthful they are and how false they are.

In the past, a campaign would put out a lie. The news media aiming to be balanced would restate the lie and then get both sides to comment on it. Even a blatant lie got repeated so often, that it had traction within voters’ consciousnesses. It’s a lot harder to do so with PolitiFact fact-checking ads and talking points and then rating them with the worst offenders getting a Pants-on-Fire lie rating with a graphic to emphasize the point.

• Blogs can be blatantly partisan for example Drudge and Powerline on the right and Atrios and the Daily Kos on the left.

• Blogs can be a powerful force for justice, even if they are leaning in one direction or the other. For example, TalkingPointsMemo exposed the US Attorneys firings, which eventually meant the downfall of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and has had ramifications directly into the more recent claims of voter registration fraud. Here are self reported facts from TalkingPointsMemo for October 2008:

Absolute Unique Visitors: 3.12 million
Visits: 15.29 million
Page Views: 30.99 million.

• Blogs can be amazing tools for mobilizing forces. For example, obscure Minnesota US Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann called Barack Obama unpatriotic on Hardball with Chris Matthews and said he that he should be investigated. Within hours the left-leaning blogosphere started a campaign to fund her fully unknown opponent Elwyn Tinklenberg. In days he receives $1.4 million dollars from independent contributors via the blogosphere. The influx of money for advertising almost immediately begins to diminish a Bachmann advantage and puts her seat in play.

• Blog sites like Pollster.com and Fiverthirtyeight.com have running commentaries on every poll and parse every number. They are all about the horse race and nothing about the issues, but they are addictive.

• Blogs allow individuals like me to be a player in a way that would have been impossible five years ago. At my blog PJNet.org, which talks about citizen media, I try to practice what I preach so occasionally I do a citizen journalism post. Here are two examples:

During the primary Rudy Giuliani came to Marietta, Ga where I live. I took out my still camera with video capabilities and went to the town square. Giuliani got met by a large Ron Paul counter-demonstration. I got it all on video and uploaded it to my site and to my blog. It received 6,700 views. I did another one last week of people waiting in an early vote presidential election line; it got 230 views. Combined those are about 7,000 sets of eyeballs diverted from other mainstream media, and I am just one guy with a little still camera with video capabilities. Multiple that times that other tens of thousands people doing similar posting and you have a real movement on your hands. How big?

• The New York Times reports :

• YouTube videos mentioning either Mr. Obama or Mr. McCain have been viewed 2.3 billion times, according to the measurement firm TubeMogul.

• “SNL” videos proved to be particularly popular online; Tina Fey’s impressions were viewed more than 50 million times.

• With 5 million views since March, Mr. Obama’s 37-minute speech about race is the most popular video on his YouTube channel. (New York Times, Nov. 2, 2008)

• A Pew Research Center survey conducted in October found that 39 percent of registered voters had watched campaign videos online.

• Four years ago in the 2004 election there was no YouTube.

So what about the overflow of information,  how can we tell the good from the bad, misinformation from good information? Part of our challenge as a university is to advance media literacy, but which is more democratic a few brand-name monopolistic media organizations dominating the news or a cacophony of voices?

Right now people are voting with their eyeballs for a cacophony of voices. Plus they are coming out to the polls in record numbers and they have a wealth of information unavailable to them in the past.

We do have some some problems looming. Much of the stimulus for the conversation comes from mainstream news sites, producing hard-to-gather journalism. The free blogosphere is undermining  the old business models that have supported quality journalism. How will solid journalism be supported in the future? We don’t know, but remember just four years ago there was no YouTube so anything is possible.

So were people miffed about the long line? I thought they would be, but you listen to what this random sample of folks had to say, you might be surprised. I was.

Starting today, registered United States voters can share their voting experiences via the Video Your Vote YouTube Channel. Some of the best videos will be showcased on PBS television, as part of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer’s Election Day broadcast.

I love this sentence fragment: “In the first presidential election since YouTube’s inception…” Can you believe that YouTube has been around less than four years? Any how, the press release continues:

In the first presidential election since YouTube’s inception, this program aims to gather massive amounts of polling place video, with the Channel serving as an online library for Election Day footage.

Go here to learn more about the project and the legalities of shooting video at polling places in your state. Here is a Judy Woodruff video:

So with all those perceptions etched in my consciousness, I was very surprised to see how calm, cool and collected she was in the Alaska gubernatorial debates. It might be that she knows Alaska well and apparently doesn’t know as much about the US economy and international affairs. That lack of knowledge could be her undoing, but I guess not.

Andrew Halcro, who debated her more than a dozen times in Alaska, writes in the Christian Science Monitor:

… she’s a master, not of facts, figures, or insightful policy recommendations, but at the fine art of the nonanswer, the glittering generality. Against such charms there is little Senator Biden, or anyone, can do.

Well almost no one. Two days after the Thursday debate the alternative Sarah Palin, Tina Fey, will be on Saturday Night Live and might again change our consciousness for better or worse depending on your point of view.

Of course, if you want to stick to the facts, then you might listen to the Christian Science Monitor interview with Halcro. It is fascinating.

Here is a key part of the essay, which is directed toward the John McCain operatives who are using lies to demean Barack Obama :

First…It isn’t enough to debunk a false claim some of the times that you report it. The media must do so every time they report the claim.

Second, the way in which falsehoods are debunked is crucial. When a candidate makes a false claim, reporters can respond one of three ways:

• They can ignore it, on the basis that a false claim is unworthy of attention.
• They can adopt the false claim as the basis of their report, as they did with this week’s stories about whether or not Barack Obama had made a sexist comment about Sarah Palin.
• They can produce a report centered on the fact that the candidate is saying something that is untrue. If it is the latest of many falsehoods, they can indicate that. If the candidate is telling more and larger falsehoods than the opposition, they can make that clear. In short, they can make the lack of credibility of the person making the false claim the theme of their coverage.

The first option privileges the lie by allowing a candidate to run around saying things that are not true — but at least it does not help spread the lie further.

The second option — even if it includes mention of the fact that the claim is false — privileges the lie a great deal by helping the candidate spread the false claims. At the end of the day, what most people take away from this week’s media coverage of the lipstick flap is likely that there is some controversy around whether Barack Obama made a sexist comment about Sarah Palin. That’s a clear advantage to McCain — and thus the media’s handling of the episode has rewarded his falsehood.

The third option punishes the falsehood. If you think the media’s job is to bring their readers and viewers the truth, this is obviously the best of the three options.

This is where some will say “but then reporters will be taking sides.”

And there is some truth to that: They’ll be taking the truth’s side.

In the musical interludes between the speakers, I surfed back to the other channels covering the convention and had to listen the dumbest commentary imaginable, which had nothing to do with the analytical or emotional thoughts or feelings I had while watching the convention unfiltered on C-Span from 8 p.m. to after 11 p.m. EDT.

So my advice , blow off the blowhards and experience the moment all by yourself. If enough of us do that, the TV folks can save money by not paying the know-nothings and invest that money into honest-to-god reporters who produce real journalism.

Update: Bryan Murley from Innovation in College Media points out in PJNet.org comments that MSNBC.com is also providing live coverage with no commentary. Thanks Bryan.

a project of the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly to help you find the truth in the presidential campaign. Every day, reporters and researchers from the Times and CQ will analyze the candidates’ speeches, TV ads and interviews and determine whether the claims are accurate.

I do believe this is an excellent use of the Internet; it will, one hopes, in time expose the campaign liars and perhaps cause the paid consultants who deal in attacks to be out of jobs. And of course, we hope that journalism like this will keep more journalists on the job.

By the way, so far according to the site, of John McCain’s 96 statements 39 are true or mostly true, and 57 vary from half truths to blatant lies. Barak Obama’s count of statements he has made: 55 are true or mostly true versus 45 half true to false.   

A record-breaking 46% of Americans have used the internet, email or cell phone text messaging to get news about the campaign, share their views and mobilize others. And Barack Obama’s backers have an edge in the online political environment.

Here is more:

Led by young voters, Democrats and Obama supporters have taken the lead in their use of online tools for political engagement.

• 74% of wired Obama supporters have gotten political news and information online, compared with 57% of online Clinton supporters.
• In a head-to-head matchup with internet users who support Republican McCain, Obama’s backers are more likely to get political news and information online (65% vs. 56%).
• Obama supporters outpace both Clinton and McCain supporters in their usage of online video, social networking sites and other online campaign activities.

Here is general information about youth, the Internet and mobile devices in this election year: 

Two-thirds of internet users under the age of 30 have a social networking profile, and half of these use social networking sites to get or share information about politics or the campaigns…

Young voters are helping to define the online political debate; 12% of online 18-29 year olds have posted their own political commentary or writing to an online newsgroup, website or blog.

And this:

35% of Americans say they have watched online political videos–a figure that nearly triples the reading the Pew Internet Project got in the 2004 race.

Read the full report here.