• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, November 4, 2014

It’s Election Day -- a day when almost all of us won’t do anything at all, but by our inaction, will elect a bunch of men and women who will make decisions that could ruin your life.  

So vote. Surprise the politicians and special interest groups. A lot of them actually spend a lot of that money on advertising to turn off the casual voter so that only the hardcore turn out. Although there’s a question of whether that actually “works,” that’s how sick the system is. An estimated $4 billion was spent on advertising for these midterm elections; only masochists could enjoy it, or run.

You can turn all that around by voting.

If you do nothing but vote against the politician with the ads that annoyed you most, you will have defeated a bunch of people, of all political stripes, who depend on you to be an ill-informed, easily swayed slug. Screw 'em. Vote. 

Watching the results, you’ll begin to discern how news coverage is morphing as streaming becomes more mainstream. Pew reports that 51% of us use YouTube, and 10% use it for news -- but tonight, several news organizations are using YouTube for their reporting of the results, as a pretty comprehensive and helpful listing from Gigaom points out.

There are big news names on that list that will be streaming live include ABC, Bloomberg Politics, PBS NewsHour, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and Comedy Central. There are undoubtedly even more news organizations that will be on YouTube, which makes it a kind of place to be, although in fact it looks like a lot of these YouTube news channels, based on the number of subscribers and number of views their videos get, have been kind of lonely.

But the reliance on YouTube points to the snacking that news consumers can get from social sites, especially in mobile applications. On Facebook, Pew says that 30% of its users use that social site for news. Even people who see news on those social sites and then go to a news organization’s Web site as a result usually don’t stay there for long; fragmentation is the way of the world. A home page is become just a quaint idea.

pj@mediapost.com