Keeping Up With the Citizens

Who ever said journalists are so special from everybody else? The political analysts sure aren't. Not with Google in charge.

That's because Google's Politics & Elections blog is making it easier for ordinary citizens to become political analysts for the rest of the world. Jake Parillo, part of Google's Politics & Elections team, announced on Monday that the team is asking for citizens to use Google's tools- Google Insights for Search, Google Trends,and Google Correlate, for example- to help the Google team discover political or election trends across the country.

People now have the ability to research and analyze their own political stories. But will they make use of it? Will these tools become commonplace with the average family? Hard to tell. Poynter.org reported last month that out of all the time people spend on the internet, only 2.6 percent of it is spent on current events or global news (22.5 percent of their time is spent on social media websites, and 35.1 percent is spent on website types not specified in the survey, including- yep- pornography). Google's bet seems to be that customizing political coverage for the average Joe is what will make people pay attention to the political world swirling around them, but the real question is whether citizens will put in the extra effort.

One thing is clear, though: if journalists plan on competing with the serious amateur news sources these days, reporters should be the first to dive in to this new technology.

Photo by Danny Sullivan/Creativecommons.org

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Elections Show Potential of Social Media

Midterm elections on Nov. 02 may have set a benchmark for the future synthesis of politics and innovation within news organizations.

Being an important day in U.S. politics, major news organizations tried to report their election-coverage by means of up-to-the-minute technology. The Washington Post and the New York Times were among the noticeable contributors to the new wave of social media in political news.

On election day, the Washington Post became the first news organization to buy a Twitter-promoted trend, #Election, in order to promote its election coverage and incite people to share their thoughts with all Twitter users following the trend.

According to Katharine Zales, head of digital news products at the Washington Post,"the reason we did it was not so much for the traffic. It was more to be front and center in the conversation." By doing so, the Washington Post tried to deliever real-time, multimedia, and personally engaging political discussion.

By purchasing a promoted trend on Twitter, the Post took a serious approach of social media as a medium by which news are transmitted nowadays.

In a similar way, the New York Times used social media in the form of a Twitter traffic map that showed candidates' tweets, retweets from the public and tweets directed at the candidates.

The Times also hosted its first live-streaming web coverage from its newsroom trying to make their election-coverage feel much closer to their audiences, just like TV.

It seems like news organizations today have acknowledged that new digital journalism requires a new a new approach to their audiences; hence, most of them see public engagement as an essential structure of their business.

By using flashy web aplications, live-streaming video and Twitter to cover the elections, news agencies have demonstrated the importance of innovation in making political news more engaging, immediate and widely available throught different platforms.

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