What we don't know about elections

I initially read the headline as "What we don't know about electrons."

Could someone please post that article? It sounds far more interesting!

I'd be much more interested in tools that explain each candidates's stance and previous actions on the issues I care about that the media won't cover, such as intellectual property, than in more horse race coverage. The horse race has been flogged to death.

I recommend being a Judge of the Election at least once. It requires generally a half-day of orientation and a day of work, and you get paid to do it. (Your mission, should you choose to accept it: work for a day as a temporary non-partisan governmental employee, making sure that a bunch of non-expert voters manage to successfully navigate democracy, without influencing their votes or allowing anyone to corrupt the process.)

After you see how the sausage is made you'll be amazed that the republic still endures.

> It’s not that political journalism has strayed from its roots, or stopped covering important elements of a modern campaign. It’s that the elements of a modern campaign have changed, and as journalists, we have not kept pace.

As someone who actually ran for a small state-level elected office in 2008, I can flat out state that journalists have strayed far far away from anything resembling journalism.

> I don’t believe that we as journalists devote enough attention to understanding those changes.

In Denver, there was ONE journalist whose "beat" covered our race. And the subject matter that the agency we were running for was a small part of what this one person's reporting covered. This guy was older than I am, and I'm old enough to be making "catch up" contributions to my IRA and 401k.

Downsizing and mergers in the newspaper industry has resulted in single reporters covering what used to be covered by a handful of reporters 2 decades ago. It isn't new technology that is enabling more productivity, it is the endless downsizing to boost share prices that has gutted and rendered news agencies useless and unfit for duty.

In 2008, when I ran for that office, there were 2 daily newspapers. In early 2009, one of them closed their doors.

> Elections will become even bigger surprises to us, and then how long will it be before readers start to ask whether we actually know the people and places we cover?

My recommendation to prove to yourself just how out of date and out of touch with modern technology that journalists are, is to run for elected office yourself. Many elected positions are part time (school boards, for example) so you won't have to give up your day job to experience it. Despite coming in dead last, and the winner spending 200x as much as I did, it was a blast.

As a web geek who loves politics, I believe the problem with campaign coverage lies much deeper. Even with data scientists on hand to analyze the same data sets the campaigns have access to I could only imagine the results would be presented in an extremely dumbed down fashion and angled to reflect each media outlet's bias. It's not a matter of ability, as they all do a decent job presenting exit poll data post election, it's that CNN knows they will achieve higher ratings showing hologram gimmicks than in depth charts and graphs.

"But the nature of media and technology has brought extensive changes to the electoral system, and I don’t believe that we as journalists devote enough attention to understanding those changes."

So much truth. The statement "journalists don't devote enough attention to understanding" is also pretty defensible.

Where's the obama github?

tweet: http://twitter.com/#!/derekwillis/status/126084472666984448

It's true, and we could always use more development help if you're in dc @catalist.us among others..