The debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney was the most tweeted-about event in U.S. political history — but is the kind of real-time commentary and instant analysis that Twitter provides a good thing or a bad thing for the political process or society as a whole? Read more at GigaOM »
Open-source principles have helped create a host of useful software, including the Linux operating system and the crowd-powered resource that is Wikipedia — but could the same approach be used to open up the process of producing government legislation? Clay Shirky argues that it could. Read more at GigaOM »
Yahoo fired its former Washington bureau chief on Wednesday for a joking comment he made during a video broadcast from the Republican convention. Isn’t it about time we admitted that journalists have emotions and opinions, rather than expecting them to be impartial robots? Read more at GigaOM »
There has been a rush of fact-checking of recent comments made by Republican vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan, but does this mean the traditional media’s obsession with objectivity and the “view from nowhere” has changed? Not really — which is why more alternative sources are necessary. Read more at GigaOM »
The rise of social media tools such as blogs and Twitter have changed the political landscape, in part by speeding up the news cycle and broadening the range of sources that are available. But are these developments good or bad for the practice of political journalism? Read more at GigaOM »
Amy Howe used to think 3,000 live blog participants was a lot. Thursday, more than 500,000 users tuned into SCOTUSblog to find out how the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on health care and what it meant. Read more »
What do you get when you mix the New York Times with a site best known for viral cat videos? We’ll soon find out as the Grey Lady announced today that it will be working with BuzzFeed to provide video from this summer’s political conventions. Read more »
How have blogs and Twitter and other forms of social media changed the nature of the political process and the media reporting of that process? At paidContent 2012, I talked with Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo and Vivian Schiller of NBC News about that question. Read more »
With each passing elections season, we’re seeing more how social media is changing the political news coverage business. It’s not just sped up the news cycle, but it’s helped kill it, said Josh Marshall, editor and publisher of TalkingPointsMemo.com, at paidContent2012. Read more »
