NAA Digital Edge Blog

Welcome to the Digital Edge Blog! The Digital Edge Blog focuses on developments, trends, best practices and more in newspaper digital media. The blog launched in 2006 (archives before August 2008 are here). We look forward to reading your comments and contributions to the Digital Edge Blog. Questions? E-mail Beth Lawton at beth.lawton@naa.org.

The New York Times has re-launched its Polling Place Photo Project - a feature the newspaper first tested during the 2006 midterm elections.

NYTimes.com is soliciting photos from Web site visitors that focus on polling places across the United States. The newspaper hopes to get a photograph of every polling location in the country, according to the Web site. 

The Polling Place Photo Project, at pollingplaces.nytimes.com, is a program from the newspaper and AIGA, the professional association for design. William Drenttel of Design Observer created the project originally before the midterm elections in November 2006. The newspaper brought back the feature for the primaries earlier this year. Thirdwave is powering the technology behind it.

As of late afternoon Monday, the Polling Place Photo Project had more than 70 photos from the general election this fall. The photos came from 23 states, including many from battleground states such as Florida and Ohio. A number of photos showed Americans living abroad filling in their absentee ballots. By late Tuesday night, readers had submitted more than 700 photos.

NYTimes.com readers uploaded more than 800 during 2007-08 primary election season.

"This is a great opportunity for Times readers to work directly with us in capturing the presidential voting experience," said Jim Roberts, editor of digital news at The New York Times in a press release.

We're waiting to hear back from NYTimes.com about their expectations for the project on Election Day.

Note: We'll be cataloging a number of interesting newspaper Web site-based election projects today, tomorrow and Wednesday. We'll be updating this blog post frequently, so please come back for more!  Do you have a neat project? Let us know by commenting below!

Most newspaper Web sites we've seen have - at least - some information about the local election candidates and/or issues; many help site visitors find their polling place. Many plan to tap into the Associated Press' online video coverage tomorrow evening. Here are a few more projects in the works as of Monday afternoon:

Monday Afternoon - Battleground States:

Blog5 on Cleveland.com - The Plain-Dealer's site at Cleveland.com has an extended version of its "Blog 5" front and center on the site. It includes "samples some of the comments Northeast Ohio bloggers are making about the presidential election."

Forum and Coverage Promo from Pittsburgh - The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a promo up asking readers to come back to the site tomorrow to share information on their voting experience. The newspaper is also promoting its live coverage for tomorrow night, including interactive maps, blogs, video reports, etc. Other sites with early online promos for their election coverage include Charlotte.com.

Twitter-Based Vote Monitoring at washingtonpost.com - Washingtonpost.com is asking readers to send them vote monitoring reports through Twitter at www.twitter.com/PostVoteMonitor or through the Web site. The Cleveland Plain Dealer has a Twitter feed on its homepage.

Build Your Ballot at Sun-Sentinel.com - The Sun-Sentinel in Florida is letting readers submit their address and get a customized ballot that includes video, biographical information and more for each candidate. They're doing this in partnership with TheVoterGuide.org, as are several other newspapers in the Tribune family.

HamptonRoads.com First Voter - The Web site affiliated with the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Va. has a section just for first-time voters.

Other Tools

Voting Problems Map - We haven't heard if any newspapers are directly partnering with the Election Protection Coalition (if you are - tell us!), but the EPC's OurLiveVote.com site has a map of where complaints are coming in from and a chart breaking out the complaint types. Take a look at the Virginia map for an example. (EPC is collecting complaints via Twitter this year and streaming those on the site.

Search Engine Watch has a guide to the tools from Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL.

Tuesday Mid-Day

I have to say this: I'm pretty impressed with how newspaper Web sites are handling this election in an all-hands-on-deck, get-the-readers-involved, multimedia way. Dozens of sites have prominent requests for information about voter lines, comments, ways to track polling problems and more. Many have online video, chats and locally-focused articles.

In addition, a number of newspapers have smartly partnered with TheVoterGuide.org (from e-thepeople), which helps the newspaper gather and organize an impressive amount of information about local elections, candidates, issues, etc. The partnership has taken a bit of pressure off of the newspapers' reporters and editors.

From TheVoterGuide.org 'about' section: "Our National Voter Guide was created in partnership with over 100 local newspapers and television stations. Candidates for office across the country were e-mailed and asked to answer local questions. Over 12,000 candidates responded to us or one of our affiliates. For some who did not respond, we collected publicly available information."

Here are a few more fun projects online right now:

Word Train - The New York Times has a crowd-sourced "word train" taking the emotional pulse of readers. Web site visitors can type in (or select) a single word that describes their current political-emotional state. The words scroll across the screen - bigger words have gotten more votes. You can submit your emotion once every 30 minutes.

Video Comments - Washingtonpost.com is accepting video commenting through Seesmic and has a special text message, Twitter and e-mail alerts program for the day. Also, WaPo is again offering live video coverage tonight. (See this NAA article from earlier this year for more info.)

Live Broadcasting - The Arizona Republic is hosting an election online video show pretty much all day today.

Wednesday Morning: Newspaper Coverage-Related Headlines

How Newspapers are Covering the Madhouse (Editor & Publisher)

Using 'Twitter Vote Report' in Your Online Election Coverage (Poynter)

Election Fires Up International Blogosphere (The Washington Post)

Visualizing Data on Election Day (Poynter)

Tell us about your project by commenting below or e-mailing me directly at beth.lawton@naa.org.

About Beth Lawton