Elections and the News

The Presidential elections of 2008 sparked “unprecedented interest within the electorate” according to findings in the Pew Internet & American Life Project. According to the same article, 46 percent of Americans used the Internet to get their political news and to share their viewpoints with others. The Pew Internet study compared the 2008 election to the election of 2004, marking key differences between how users got their content and how they shared that content with others. One noteable change was in the growth of social networking. Many interested viewers used Facebook and MySpace for political activity. Blogging was another area to grow.

In light of the 2009 elections, I reviewed the USA TODAY, one of the top 25 newspapers in the United States and analyzed their political news sections.

The article entitled, “Off-year elections will test Democrats’ Influence,” caught my attention for the mere reason that in the 2008 election, younger voters gravitated more towards the Democratic party, according to the Pew Internet study.  The article was informative and they had links to social networking sites both along the right hand side of the column and at the bottow of the page. These included links to Twitter, Facebook, Digg, MySpace, Reddit, and many others. At the very top of the page, there were a number of videos relating to the political elections that interested readers could watch. There was also a link to sign up for E-mail newsletters from the USA TODAY which would allow new content to be delivered straight to an interest viewers E-mail inbox.

For the most part, the political news content followed Pew’s recommendations minus the use of charts and graphics. Aside from the links to social networking sites, there weren’t many other interactive tools that were used.