It's widely argued that the mainstream media did a fairly poor job of holding George W. Bush accountable during his presidency by failing to adequately challenge the administration's claims and positions. And it's just as widely argued that the press is in the tank for Barack Obama. Neither position is exactly true, but perception is reality, and those alleged media failings are undermining a lot of the public's faith in journalism at a time when the news business is already struggling for economic and business reasons.
With Obama about to take office, the St. Petersburg Times' PolitiFact site is trying to get off on the right foot in keeping track of the new president's record. You don't automatically think of the St. Pete Times as a bastion of political reporting or government watchdogging, but Bill Adair and his crew at PolitiFact have carved out a nice niche trying to use non-traditional journalism forms to monitor politicians' words and actions.
During the 2008 campaign, PolitiFact ran a solid fact-checking service, based on a nice visual gimmick called the Truth-O-Meter, to keep watch on the truthiness of the candidates' promises. Now the site has expanded that concept to tracking Obama's many pledges to change the way government works. More than 500 pledges, in fact, culled by the PolitiFact team from speeches, position papers, interviews and the like.
Voila: The Obameter. The site rates each promise on a scale ranging from "Promise Broken" to "Promise Kept," with some nuances in between, like "Compromise." So far, with the administration yet to officially start, virtually all of the promises are rated as "No action," but two–Republicans in the Cabinet and more detailed reporting of capital gains–have been scored as "Promise Kept."
This is a cool tool, and PolitiFact is going to be making it available as a widget (several widgets, in fact) so that other sites and blogs can keep track of the new administration's performance, as well. That's the sort of content syndication that should be standard for sophisticated Web sites, pushing to have their content carried far and wide, with branding and traffic advantages redounding to the home site. (Politico is doing a master class in this these days, with dozens of newspapers now signed up to carry its content.)
None of this really looks like traditional journalism. The Obameter doesn't follow conventional story formats in any way, and is really a hybrid between data, reporting, news and information presentation. We need to see a lot more of this. There are a many different ways to tell a story, especially online, and the more experimentation we see with journalism forms, the faster the state of the art will evolve and thrive.
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