Blogs Take Lead in Reporting Polling Problems

BLOGS TAKE LEAD IN REPORTING POLLING PROBLEMS
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Tom Zeller]
Blogs of all political stripes spent most of yesterday detailing reports of voting machine malfunctions and ballot shortages, effectively becoming an online national clearinghouse of the polling problems that still face the election system. And in a new twist this year, many bloggers buttressed their accounts of electoral shenanigans with links to videos posted on the video Web site YouTube. That the blog now has a firm place in the choreography of national events — and in elections perhaps more so than in any other cultural exercise — is a boon to the democratic process, said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of Internet governance at Oxford University and a co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. “In a lot of ways they’re helping to set the agenda for the mainstream media in fast-moving events like this,” Mr. Zittrain said. “They just need to be able to produce enough that’s credible quickly to give a lead.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/08/us/politics/08blogs.html
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