Election Day shows us that many stories about the American voting process and the need for election reform slip beneath the radar of mainstream news coverage. Now that we're just a few short months away from Election Day 2008, we want to take a close look at how
these issues are being covered today.
From July 1-14, POV and PBS Engage partnered with NewsTrust.net, a nonprofit social news site devoted to finding good journalism, to review current news stories about the 2008 elections with a focus on the voting process from the perspective of the American man and woman on the street. Over this two week period, reviewers examined articles on election reform coverage from a wide range of sources, from The New Yorker and The New York Times to The Nation and The Huffington Post. See the top stories and a summary of what reviewers found over on the NewsTrust.net blog.
While the News Hunt is now closed, the hunt for good journalism never ends. Check out NewsTrust.net for more opportunities to review news stories and to participate in the effort to highlight quality journalism
To get started, simply sign up for an account on the NewsTrust.net site. Then you can rate as many articles as you like, using NewsTrust's easy-to-use online tools. From the site's homepage, click the "Politics" tab, then under "Topics>U.S. Elections," click "Presidential Election 2008." On that page, you can click any article title to go directly to the full article on the website where it was posted so you can read it thoroughly. When you're ready, go back to NewsTrust; a review form will appear in a separate window, inviting you to rate that story — you can answer as many or as few of the questions on the form as you like. For more tips on how to join this news hunt, check NewsTrust's New Member Welcome page.
Both here and on NewsTrust's site, you can see the top-rated Presidential Election 2008 stories as reviewed by NewsTrust users. You'll see where the articles were published, a brief user summary/commentary on each article and links to other reviews. You'll also see a direct link to the review page so you can contribute your own evaluation of a story's coverage — you can choose to rate a story either with an overall recommendation or according to specific criteria, such as fairness or accuracy. If you see an article online that isn't available on the NewsTrust site, you can submit it by using their bookmarklet, which makes it easy to submit news stories from your Web browser.
Thanks to everyone who participated in making the News Hunt a success, and keep hunting!