Digital Front Pages: Obama Elected President of the United States of America

When there's a historic moment, people like to chronicle the front pages of newspapers from the next day. But in this day and age, I thought the digital front pages of news organizations would be far more interesting, snapped moments after the big story broke. Here's how some of the most popular news outlets in the world handled the story, "Obama Elected President of the United States of America."

See how each handles the gravity of the story:

The New York Times:

Wall Street Journal:

USA Today:

Los Angeles Times:

Washington Post:

Chicago Tribune:

Chicago Sun-Times:

New York Daily News:

New York Post:

Boston Globe:

Philadelphia Inquirer:

Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Houston Chronicle:

Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

San Francisco Chronicle:

Detroit Free Press:

New York Newsday:

Anchorage Daily News:

CNN:

ABC:

CBS:

NBC:

FOX:

The Huffington Post:

New York Magazine:

Le Monde (France):

La Reppublicca (Italy):

The Guardian (U.K.)

Truly fascinating.

C-SPAN launches ‘Debate Hub’ as social, political destination

Originally posted at ZDNet's The Toybox.

If you love using your gadgets -- and you're fired up about this year's election -- have I got a site for you.

Less than 24 hours before the first debate, C-SPAN, the cable network known for airing non-stop, unfiltered coverage of government proceedings, has unveiled its "Debate Hub," a social destination for the American public during the four presidential and vice-presidential debates leading up to this year's election.

The site allows users to follow the debate in near-real-time on their gadgets and simultaneously see how the Web is reacting to it. On the debate side, the site mashes up a transcript of the debate with video footage -- sort of like the New York Times -- and allows you to watch and share/embed clips of your choosing as the debate develops (it's on a 10-minute delay).

On the social networking side, the site casts a wide net and aggregates Twitter feeds and blogs on-the-fly and offers outgoing links to them. It's like a real-time showcase of how the 'Net is reacting to the debate, and it's the perfect way to utilize those gadgets on debate night: Twitter from your T-Mobile G1, blog from your Netbook -- and see it show up on C-SPAN's site.

Call it the ultimate elections app.

(The site is a sort of coming-out party for the network, who first jumped on the web with this year's Democratic and Republican National Conventions.)

A producer for the site, Ben O'Connell, tells me that the entire site was built using open-source software. It uses Wordpress as a platform and a MySQL backend on a Windows server. The clickable, color-coded timeline is based on SIMILE, an MIT project, and everything is built with "PHP, jQuery, and a lot of custom Javascript," O'Connell said.

Similar to Twitter itself, C-SPAN is pulling in tweets live from the Twitter Search API, tagged with "Obama," "McCain," "Palin," "Biden," "Barr," "Lehrer" (and "Brokaw" when he is moderating), "#debate08," and "#suspending." The site's got a small staff that will "monitor and include anything else that is trending and makes sense" throughout the course of the four debates, O'Connell said.

As for the sharable, embeddable videos, you can slice them the way you want, much like if you were using Final Cut Pro (note the green and red sliders in the second screen):

The site is designed by JESS3, whose principals, Zvi Band and Jesse Thomas, seem to have drawn inspiration from Edward Tufte's sparklines for the debate word clouds. I'm also told that the site has 14 people employed from New Media Strategies for outreach, monitoring and community engagement.

From what I've seen thus far -- it's tough, because the site won't really heat up until the first scheduled debate (9:00PM EST Friday) -- it's a great resource and a really neat way to text, Twitter, blog and otherwise engage on debate night on a much grander scale. C-SPAN's mission is to be in the public service, and it's clearly doing so here -- spotlighting the public discourse happening via mobile devices, with some fancy interactives for those who stop by.

Come debate night, tweet away.

Covering Clinton's Birthday: Why 60 Is The New 80 For The Press

Walking down the street on Hillary Clinton's birthday a little while ago, I saw a preponderance of front-page salutes to her big 6-0.

It made me stop and think: why?

What's the big deal about 60? Why should we care? For some reason, the press thought it necessary to lead off the day's edition with that story and cover, and I couldn't for the life of me think why.

Is the press inadvertently supporting Hillary Clinton's campaign?

After all, Hillary Clinton is arguably the candidate with the least to attribute to her age. On the other hand, I saw (and anticipate seeing) few covers heralding Barack Obama's birthday, who is constantly under criticism for being too young and experienced a candidate. And switching sides, I didn't see any front covers for John McCain's birthday either, and he's remarkably older than the rest of the pack.

It seems to me that this non-story's impact was only in helping a Clinton campaign, and that in hindsight, it was a nearly-ethical slip. Honestly -- what was the point of this story? The Editorialiste wonders.

What do you think?

Pride In The Name of News

If you care about getting the news in a timely fashion, there is no reason to read a newspaper.

Spot news, it seems, is disappearing from the pages and moving to the screens.

A recent New York Times newsroom memo from Bill Keller announced that the Internet will be key to 2008 political coverage:

For this Presidential election cycle we are organizing our coverage in a new (for us) way: for the first time, a central political desk will supervise coverage for the newspaper and the web. This new desk will include not only newspaper editors, but also people with experience in web production, database reporting and software development. Newspaper and online journalism will get equal emphasis — we are well past the day when we can think of ourselves as a newspaper with a Web site on the side — for an audience that now expects its political news to arrive in full multimedia, interactive glory.

The goal is to develop a seamless operation that can feed our blog and home page with breaking news all day long, produce innovative and value-added multimedia and database reports -- and then deliver the smartest, freshest possible stories to our newsprint readers the next morning.

Basically, Keller and Co. have reorganized the way instant-news is produced at The Times. He's placed equality between the paper and the website, and as far as political stories go, he values the benefit of clickable electoral maps, live-voting feeds and comparison charts that aren't truncated to fit a peice of paper.

As I've mentioned before, this change at The Times is indicative of a new way to do the news: Internet first, paper second. And it's more profitable than critics think.

Web journalism has finally found its reporters. And it seems they're more inclined than ever to be versed in web production, multimedia and traditional reporting savvy.

The future is clearer than we think: spot news will reside online, and adventurous, well-rounded journalists will helm the ship.

Conversely, expect to see a change in the very basic format of writing a news story: half-reported stories will rarely make it to the page, and analysis will become a critical component of a basic news story - the real reason people will keep reading a publication.

The "news" in "newspaper" is now a relative term: it's news to anyone who hasn't read the website.

Will newspapers save the big, muckraking stories for the printed page? Maybe, if they think no one else has the story. But if a newspaper smells competition, don't expect to see any "exclusives" on the printed page.

For newspapers who pride themselves on getting a story first (and being cited as so), posting it online with a timestamp is the new proof of bleeding-edge legitimacy.

After all, aren't newspapers sick of citing blogs as the first sources for stories?