• by Mark Walsh , October 14, 2008

The Internet has had an undeniable impact on the 2008 election, but news organizations are still wrestling with the mashup of traditional and newer, participatory forms of political coverage, a panel of online news executives and journalists agreed Tuesday.

Gathered for a seminar on digital politics at the Time Warner Summit: Politics 2008 conference in New York, panelists from media outlets including CNN, Yahoo and YouTube affirmed the growing influence of the Internet on politics from former Sen. George Allen's "macaca" moment to the YouTube debates to candidates launching their presidential bids online.

"In my opinion, the most important debate question we've seen didn't come from any moderators," said Ari Melber, the Net movement correspondent for The Nation magazine and writer for its Campaign '08 blog. "It was the question about whether candidates would meet with scary dictators without pre-conditions" during the Democratic YouTube debate.

Melber said that the user-submitted question (via video) on whether candidates would meet with the leaders of Iran, Cuba, North Korea and Venezuela without preconditions has proven to have "one of the longest shelf lives" of any policy question throughout the debates.

"We're giving power to the people and letting them create their own megaphones online," said Steve Grove, head of news and politics for YouTube.

The most recent debate between Barack Obama and John McCain, however, showed the limits of Web-based populism in cracking the highest circles of traditional media and politics. The candidates' town hall-style event in Nashville was widely panned for its dullness despite the inclusion of user-submitted questions through MyDebates.org, a joint project of MySpace and the Commission on Presidential Debates.

Lee Brenner, MySpace's executive producer of political programming, said the social network had no say in the debate format or what online questions were selected by moderator Tom Brokaw. He ended up asking four of the 25,000 questions submitted via the MySpace initiative.

"We handed the questions over so we didn't have the responsibility of doing it, but we weren't asked to have that responsibility," Brenner said.

The Open Debate Commission, an umbrella group that includes the heads of Craigslist, Wikipedia, MoveOn, Personal Democracy Forum and other organizations, sent a letter last week to both candidates urging them to change the rules for the final debate Wednesday to allow for a more lively give-and-take.

Fusing traditional and new media within the same organization can be difficult in itself, noted Alex Wellen, deputy director of CNNPolitics.com. "It's so hard to take the collective wisdom of all you know and have that reflected in many different media," he said. For the most part, CNN uses its on-air political team to generate online coverage through text stories, blogs and videos.

Kathleen Hayden, editor of CNN sister property AOL News, said the site adopts mainly a blog format that aggregates news from a variety of sources including The Associated Press, Reuters, and USA Today as well as various blogs and Propeller, its citizen journalism effort.

Keeping pace with the new types of social media and news delivery such as Twitter is especially challenging, she said. "We're going to get further and further specialized, which for someone like me is a challenge because our goal originally was to be for everybody," Hayden said.

While acknowledging a growing merger of traditional and new media formats, the panelists addressed the need to maintain high standards even as they inevitably embrace more user-generated material. That issue was underscored most recently by a false report posted on CNN's citizen journalism site iReport.com that Apple CEO Steve Jobs had a heart attack.

Discussing iReport, CNN's Wellen said it was created with "the philosophy that it might be place to establish something community-oriented and it has been an experiment and there have been some high upsides to it, and stories like this, where there's a downside to it." A CNN spokesperson emphasized that the story did not appear on CNN.com, and was quickly taken down once found to be fraudulent.

In working with a wide variety of news partners, Alan Warms, general manager of Yahoo News, stressed that the Web portal has dozens of editors to vet the quality and accuracy of material before posting. "You need to have a human being at some level making sure you're serving readers in the right way," said Warms.

At the same time, he also made a pitch for increased political advertising online to help pay for the abundance of Web coverage. Yahoo's efforts include a 2008 presidential election site and an interactive political dashboard for tracking the race.

"There aren't a lot of endemic advertisers in politics," said Warms. "The question, I think, is going to be how can you continue to afford the online operation without being able to monetize that."