The best campaign interactives
By Jonathan Dube
Here's a look at some of the best online presidential campaign features so far in 2004, from interactive graphics and multimedia slide shows to candidate selectors and Weblogs.
INTERACTIVE FEATURES
Washingtonpost.com's Comparing the Candidates: The Washington Post Web site put together a very impressive interactive tool using Flash that enables readers to select any two Democratic candidates and compare how they stand on any of 9 major issues in a side-by-side chart. A great use of the Web to enhance the newspaper's already robust election coverage.
NYTimes.com's Challenging Bush: Audio slide shows of each of the Democratic contenders, narrated by New York Times' correspondents.
MSNBC.com's Road to the Nomination: An interactive guide to the primaries and nomination process. Includes an narrated animated look at the nomination process; a quiz on where the candidates stand; a map detailing delegate totals; and a vote that enables you to track the candidates' popularity by week.
(Disclaimer)
AOL Straw Poll: AOL users have been invited to cast virtual ballots in state-by-state faceoffs. A nice interactive map of the U.S. shows states colored according to the candidate currently in the lead. If you click on a state, you'll see how many AOL members in that state voted for each candidate, and those numbers are compared with how many people in the nation voted for each candidate. AOL News Director Gary Kebbel says AOL plans to compare the "straw poll" results with the actual primary results.
CBSNews.com's Democrats Decide: A slew of interactiaves packaged together, including a calendar, photo essays, a look at state-by-state census data, a candidate selector quiz and a video archive.
CNN.com's Presidential Primary Explainer: An interactive map of the U.S. that explains how each state's primary works and includes the winners going back to 1988. But it hasn't been updated with this year's winners.
NYTimes.com's Race for the Nomination: A nice set of interactive color-coded data maps. In addition to maps showing where the delegates are and the results by state, the map lets readers see state-by-state results by candidate.
USAToday.com's Fight for Delegates: Another interactive look at the results so far and delegates up-for-grabs, divided up by calendar date. Not as much data as the nytimes.com version.
The (Columbia, S.C.) State newspaper's S.C. Students Vote! A virtual polling site, designed especially for students in the Newspaper's in Education program. Among the things you can do:
» Learn about the candidates and what they stand for.
» Share your opinions on the candidates and voting in a special forum.
» Send in photos of what your class is doing for election day.
» Vote for your candidate in our password-protected site for Newspaper in Education teachers and students.
New Hampshire primary interactives: Lots of great multimedia packages published about the New Hampshire primary.
POLITICAL GAMES
Presidential Market 2004: PBS FRONTLINE has partnered with Minnesota Public Radio's Marketplace and KCET to create a cool online game called Presidential Market 2004. Players build virtual "portfolios" by trading shares of "stock" in the major 2004 presidential candidates. The object of the game is to finish -- on Election Day, Nov. 2, 2004 -- with the highest value portfolio by executing savvy, calculated trades throughout the Democratic primaries and the general election campaign, by betting on the likelihood that a candidate's "share price" will go up or down at any given time as a result of campaign developments or other events. In other words, Presidential Market 2004 is "a simulated futures market in which only the shrewdest political analysts, and the shrewdest traders, will come out ahead."
Slate's Electability Whack-a-Pol: Perhaps the most fun of all the interactives, this game helps the reader identify the most electable candidate by eliminating candidates with the most serious flaws. You choose from nine positions or "flaws" most likely to make a candidate unelectable and click "bad" or "fatal," depending on how damaging that flaw is. "Fatal" will eliminate all candidates who possess that flaw. "Bad" will merely knock such candidates down a notch. The game ends when only one candidate is left standing. Imagine what viewership would be like if debates were decided like this!
INTERACTIVE CANDIDATE SELECTORS
Vote by Issues Quiz: One of the first news sites to offer this type of feature was WBUR, Boston's public radio station, which has done so in the past for local elections and has a tool that it licenses to other sites that want to use it for local races. For the presidential campaign, WBUR partnered with PBS's Online NewsHour. They submitted 14 questions to all the Democratic candidates and used their answers to build this quiz. To be fair, the quiz continually randomizes the order in which issues are considered and in which the candidates' positions anonymously appear on the page.
President Match : AOL NEWS and Time magazine partnered to create a site dedicated to helping readers decide who to vote for, www.presidentmatch.com. Time magazine asked all the Democratic candidates -- plus President Bush -- for their positions on more than a dozen questions. Readers don't have to answer every question - just the ones "that are important to you." The sum of a reader's answers determines the best candidate for him or her. Time and AOL News plan to add third-party candidates to President Match after the primaries are over.
Campaign 2004 Democratic issues quiz: Spokesmanreview.com, the Web site of The Spokesman-Review of Washington state, took a different approach. The site identified 10 key issues by querying its readers here through this online form. Spokesmanreview.com then gleaned statements on each of those issues from the candidates' campaign Web sites and from On The Issues, a nonpartisan Web site. Spokesmanreview.com removed the names from the statements and set the quiz up so the questions pop up in random order. Like in the other quizes, at the end you find out how often you agreed with which
candidates
2004 American Presidential Candidate Selector: Here's a similar tool from SelectSmart.com, a site that specializes in quizzes like this. SelectSmart.com says the candidates' positions have been determined "first by the candidate's actions, then their public votes, followed by their public statements, and whenever possible, special interest group rankings of the candidate have been factored in." The results page links to information about the candidates, including links to their Web sites, public statements and news reports.
Minnesota Public Radio's Select a Candidate: This one has a clever twist: For each question the reader is asked, there is an option to select whether "This is an important issue to me" or the quiz should "Ignore this issue."
CBSNEWS.com's Candidate Matchmaker: A relatively simple quiz.
WEBLOGS/JOURNALS ON NEWS SITES
Times on the Trail: The New York Times launched its first weblog this week. "Times on the Trail" is a "continuously updated report from the campaign trail reported and edited by the Washington bureau of The Times and produced by NYTimes.com." The blog includes an excellent collection of well-organzed links in the right column, including "a selective guide to today's campaign coverage on the Web."
Related: Q&A with NYTimes.com Editor on blogs
ABC News' The Note: The original of the daily online political dispatches. This daily political news weblog, first published on Jan. 14, 2002, quickly became a must-read compendium of political news and analysis. The Note, which began as an internal staff e-mail, is written by Mark Halperin and other members of ABC's political unit. Washington Post White House correspondent Dana Milbank once told The Washingtonian, "It's the arbiter of who is on the cutting edge." Among its coups: The Note was the first major news publication to report on Trent Lott's comments about Strom Thurmond that led to Lott's resignation.
NBC's First Read: When Elizabeth Wilner left ABC News's Political Unit, where she had helped write The Note, she started First Read for NBC, a similar daily dispatch. It's actually a daily memo prepared by NBC News' political unit for NBC News, analyzing the morning's political news -- and then posted online for the public to read as well.
MSNBC's Campaign Embeds: MSNBC has "embedded" reporters with each of the Democratic candidates. In addition to filing on-air reports for the cable network, they've each been writing weblogs about their candidates.
CBS News' Washington Wrap and Roadblog: Washington Wrap is CBS News's Political Unit's version of The Note. Also check out the new Campaign Roadblog, with excellent observations and anecdotes from CBS News reporters on the road covering the presidential candidates.
CNN Morning Grind: CNN's version of ABC's The Note daily political memo. Not as well-known, but better organized and more concise.
The Washington Post's White House Briefing: Dan Froomkin offers a comprehensive look each weekday morning at the most interesting items about the president and his staff from major newspaper, magazine, and broadcast websites and weblogs.
Zero Four: U.S. Elections Blog: For an international perspective, check out The Finanacial Times election weblog.
Campaign Journal: The New Republic's Ryan Lizza is supplementing his weekly magazine coverage with this daily blog. It includes some quick analysis as well as notes from the campaign trail.
Slate's Kaus Files: A self-described "mostly political weblog" written by Mickey Kaus.
Knight Ridder's Hot off the Trail: A blog compiled and edited by Knight Ridder journalists covering the presidential campaign. This is a great example of sharing content across a network, as all the sites benefit from the coverage -- especially when there are primaries in states Knight Ridder has newspapers in, such as South Carolina (The State).
In-Forum.com's Flickertail: The Web site of North Dakota's The Forum newspaper blogged as the caucuses approach in a Weblog called "Flickertail."
spokesmanreview.com's Spin control blog: The Spokesman-Review's Jim Camden traveled all the way from Washington state to New Hampshire to blog the primary -- check it out.
What are the best online political features you've seen? Post them below.
Feb 27, 2004 | E-MAIL | SAVE | PRINT | PERMALINK | DISCUSS(3)
Discussion
3 comments about 'The best campaign interactives'I totally agree with the statement, "If I depend on the media as the source of my information, then I am bound by their logic. I don't, -so I'm not" --Dennis Kucinich
Posted by Jo Murphy at February 27, 2004 6:19 PM
Is it just me that finds this list annoyingly insular? There's just one website--that of the Financial Times (which is moreover misspelt)--from outside the US. I realise that US websites may provide the most in depth election coverage, but I think it would have been worthwhile to point readers to more non-American websites. Not only do some of these have very good election coverage but they also offer a valuable perspective from "outside the box"...
Posted by Gareth Powell at March 19, 2004 3:00 AM
great well rounded list.
thanks,
debbie
Posted by debbie at July 3, 2004 7:09 PM
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