Competing old-new media alliances including CNN and YouTube, MTV and MySpace, ABC News and Facebook have promised to shake up the political process by mashing up traditional TV news with the Internet's user-empowering tools from Web video to instant polling.

Some view the partnerships mainly as marriages of convenience in which stodgy network news outfits attempt to graft on a measure of Web 2.0 cachet to lure more youthful viewers. Emerging social sites, meanwhile, gain legitimacy by joining with the established media to help pick the next president.

For the TV networks, the desire to tap into the social networking phenomenon for political coverage is understandable. Some 42% of those ages 18 to 29 say they regularly learn about the presidential campaign from the Internet--the highest percentage for any news source, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

Whether momentous or merely expedient, media and political experts agree that these alliances are the first steps toward the increasing convergence of TV and the Internet in shaping political coverage in the digital age.

"Symbolically, this year represents the start of something that will emerge as important as television has been for political campaigns," said Robert Thompson, founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University.

Making the biggest splash so far have been the CNN/YouTube-sponsored Democratic and Republican debates, in which viewers submitted video questions via YouTube to be answered by the candidates during the CNN broadcasts.

Despite the hoopla surrounding the event, the Democratic YouTube debate on July 23 drew an underwhelming 2.6 million viewers--less than a June debate aired by CNN without the video-sharing site's involvement. At the time, however, CNN said it had attracted the largest, youngest audience the network ever had for a debate.

CNN's more recent Republican YouTube debate on Nov. 28 fared much better, breaking all records for a primary presidential debate on cable TV with 4.4 million viewers.

Even so, the debates came under fire from critics in the blogosphere because CNN had selected the video questions presented on-air rather than letting YouTube users vote on which should be asked.

And in an interview last week, Thompson called the 3,000 and 5,000 videos sent in for the Democratic and Republican debates, respectively, "anemic." "The amount of submissions was incredibly unimpressive," he said. "I would've expected that to be 100-fold."

Still, Thompson described the new format as groundbreaking because of the quality of responses elicited from candidates. "The questions tended to have a degree of frankness and candor that you wouldn't necessarily have gotten in another situation, and that forced candidates to answer accordingly," he said.

By creating their own mini-video productions, people were more comfortable asking whatever questions they wanted, Thompson said.

The pairing of youth media rivals MTV and MySpace may have seemed surprising at first glance. But their joint effort to host a series of presidential candidate "dialogues" is probably the most natural fit of any of the TV-social network alliances.

"MySpace is the largest online social network with high interactive capability, and MTV is the original youth-oriented TV network that pioneered political coverage for this group," said Lee Brenner, MySpace's political director. "With our combined forces, we thought we'd be even more potent."

Of course, MTV's political involvement goes back to its Choose or Lose voter registration campaign of the early 90s, which included the famed "boxers or briefs" town hall forum with Bill Clinton.

Going fast-forward, its most recent series of election forums with John Edwards, Barack Obama and John McCain have featured questions posed via instant message, online video, e-mail and live audience participation.

Online viewer reactions during the presidential dialogues were also captured on MySpace and MTV.com through MySpace's Flektor live polling widget. By employing a range of interactive tools to enhance the traditional town hall format, the dialogues have proven to be the most successful collaboration so far, according to Joshua Levy, associate editor of the techPresident blog and the Personal Democracy Forum.

"(MTV and MySpace) are really taking advantage of these technologies to engage young people who you can only reach by IM or sending a message on MySpace or Facebook," he said.

MySpace's Brenner said millions of people have now watched the dialogues on MTV or on-demand online, where segments of the broadcasts have been posted. With Super Tuesday fast approaching on Feb. 5 when 24 states will hold primaries, Brenner said the dialogues will break from the usual one-candidate format to host "something more comprehensive." He declined to provide further details.

In co-sponsoring back-to-back Democratic and Republican debates on Jan. 5, ABC News and Facebook stuck with a more standard approach than CNN/YouTube or MTV/MySpace. ABC News anchor and moderator Charlie Gibson posed questions to a winnowed field of candidates on both sides without direct input from Facebook members.

The new wrinkle was a Facebook newsdesk, where correspondent Bianna Golodryga reported during the broadcast on reaction and views from Facebook users to the debate based on poll questions on the site's U.S. politics page, co-sponsored by ABC News.

The broadcast drew big ratings--9.4 million and 7.3 million, respectively, for the Democratic and Republican debates--while Gibson earned praise for giving candidates the room to engage with each other on election issues. For Facebook, the debates helped boost the number of people using its recently launched U.S. politics application to more than 1 million.

"Our goal was to have an active, ongoing debate on Facebook about the election, not to simply supply questions to a TV debate," said Facebook spokesman Matt Hicks. Discussions and issues raised by Facebook members were also incorporated into ABC's debate coverage and used to inform Charlie Gibson's questions, according to Hicks.

The most recent--and seemingly unlikely--election coverage team is CBS News and Digg, the community site where news stories are ranked based on user voting. Under the partnership, political stories from Digg will appear in a box on the politics section of CBSNews.com.

Meanwhile, CBSNews.com campaign stories and videos will carry Digg buttons for people to submit and rate content on Digg. The site's notoriously independent-minded users have already expressed doubts about joining forces with a pillar of the mainstream media.

"Looks like corporate old media is trying to save themselves and buy up all the new media they can before its too late. Way to sell out Digg," wrote one user nicknamed "Proletariat" in commenting on the CBS deal on Digg. And from "peaceninja": "CBS will quickly withdraw from this partnership when they see over half of their articles at 0 or buried."

CBS News can only hope that its latest bid to cultivate a younger audience turns out better than the hiring of Katie Couric.

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