Publications
Newsletter
Subscribe to our free mailing list for event announcements, CSM news and our latest reports.
Feeds
Subscribe to News RSS feed
Subscribe to iCalendar
News from the Future of Public Media
Innovation in Focus: PBS Vote 2008
email discuss Posted by Claire Darby on Aug 3, 2008 at 4:08 AM
In one of the longest and most highly-anticipated build-ups to a presidential election in years, PBS has launched “Vote 2008,” a website that aggregates and highlights the best public media coverage of the 2008 election. By gathering video, news, and online tools from national programs and local stations, PBS Vote 2008 can bring in-depth election-related content from PBS’ trusted news and public affairs producers to light in a new way.
Drawing on a variety of news stories, video, online tools and user comments from public television and public radio sites across the nation, Vote 2008 is a collection of everything election-related that aims to provide a forum for political issues and a way for users to thoughtfully engage with each other.
One of the most popular features of Vote 2008 is a selection of social media widgets that can be added to personal websites or social networking pages. The applications are designed to move passive consumers of news into the more active role of participant. With the “Ask Your Lawmaker” tool, users can submit questions they’d like to see elected officials asked, and they can vote for other users’ questions that they think are particularly important. Then the journalists from the Capitol News Connection take the most popular questions and do their best to get them answered. Taking the participation even further, the “Get My Vote” tool gives people a forum—video, audio, or written—to express their opinions, while the “Idea Generator—Health Care” lets users propose their own solutions to the problems the health care system faces.
PBS Vote 2008 is also the home of the interactive election map, a map that aggregates election news from public broadcasting stations across the country and allows users to make their own predictions about the outcome of the election. The map, as presented by Lee Banville of the Online News Hour with Jim Lehrer at June’s Beyond Broadcast conference, is just one more part of PBS’ strategy to engage users in the upcoming election and allow them to connect to each other.
PBS, like the Center for Social Media, is part of a group of nonprofit organizations with a common goal: to push forward into the future of public media. In an initiative funded by the Ford Foundation, the group’s work fosters experimentation to forge the public media structures and projects of tomorrow.
Discussion
There are no comments on this blog entry yet. Start the discussion below.