802 Online

I spoke too soon! There's some great Vermont YouTube footage up at the Exit Voices blog. Somebody from VCAM is going out and interviewing Burlington voters as they leave the polls, and posting these videos. I love it! My only criticisms are that the sound and the image seem a little out of synch, and there's no names IDing the voters. Other than that, I love it.

I think this one's my favorite, because of the guy at the end. He says, "I think it's really important that candidates know that all of these signs make no difference to how I vote. What I really want to hear more about is their position on the issues, and less about what the other person isn't doing." But you have to make it through the flaming liberal to see him.

VCAM has set up an election day blog called Exit Voices. People are leaving their voting stories in the comment thread of the post.

Says Vermonter:

I voted in Monkton this morning at 7:30 — and for the first time onan optical scan ballot. No more folded paper in a plywood box for us.

Not sure exactly how I feel about it…

Kind of missed the folksy smalltown feel of the old system. But, atleast optical scans have both the benefits of speedy vote counting anda paper trail.

Not sure why, but I love this kind of anthropolical snapshot of our electoral process.

And I love election day! It's like a big holiday. Also, it gives us the opportunity to put the election behind us.

UPDATE: People are also sharing their voting stories on Freyne Land. Surprise surprise.

Hey, I saw another report on that circulation study that I thought was worth noting. Journalism.com has this story, A closer look at plunging circulation. Basically it says many newspapers are keeping their numbers from falling even faster by bribing their customers.

In other words fully paid circulation is typically falling even faster than the overall totals reported this week.Apparently, newspaper companies trying to bolster the numbers eitherpushed deeply discounted introductory offers at readers or extendeddiscounts they were already offering many subscribers rather thantrying to convert them to fully paid.

That would square with my experience with my New York Times Sunday subscription. Last time I tried to cancel, they kept me by promising me a continued discount. I think my discount is about to run out, though, so I'm probably going to dump the paper. Just can't afford to pay more than I would at the newsstand to have somebody drop  it off at my house. And if that means that some weeks I don't get the paper, well...

Thinking this morning about blogging, for the panel tonight.

I just came across this story at Editor and Publisher about a female U.S. servicewoman who killed herself in Iraq after she objected to U.S. interrogation techniques.

She died in September, 2003, but we're reading about it now because a reporter started asking questions about her death. The media originally reported that she died due to a "non-hostile weapons discharge," which is apparently fairly common in Iraq.

But in this case, a longtime radioand newspaper reporter named Kevin Elston, unsatisfied with the publicstory, decided to probe deeper in 2005, "just on a hunch," he toldE&P today. He made "hundreds of phone calls" to the military andcouldn't get anywhere, so he filed a Freedom of Information Actrequest. When the documents of the official investigation of her deatharrived, they contained bombshell revelations. Here’s what theFlagstaff public radio station, KNAU, where Elston now works, reportedyesterday:

“Peterson objected to the interrogation techniquesused on prisoners. She refused to participate after only two nightsworking in the unit known as the cage. Army spokespersons for her unithave refused to describe the interrogation techniques Alyssa objectedto. They say all records of those techniques have now been destroyed….”

She was was then assigned to the base gate, where shemonitored Iraqi guards, and sent to suicide prevention training. “Buton the night of September 15th, 2003, Army investigators concluded sheshot and killed herself with her service rifle,” the documentsdisclose.

I bring this up because it's a good example of how a reporter's persistence can bring important information to light when the government (or corporations, or whomever) wishes to suppress it.

I recognize that reporters can work in new media, but I always come back to this point — most good investigative reporting is not cheap. It's rarely done by part-timers or amateurs. It's done by people who have the time and energy to make "hundreds of phone calls" to the military, who have the skills to gather and interpret data, and then spit it back to people in way that they can understand and digest.

I guess my point is that, while I'm all for democratization of media, I also recognize the need to save what's best about traditional media. We need to be able to pay people to do investigative reporting. I know that's not a real newsflash at this point, but it's something to remember as we talk about how great blogs are.

Bill Simmon at Candleblog has organized a blogger panel tomorrow (6:30 at the VCAM studio) and has invited me to be a part of it. I'm sharing the table with Steve Benen and Michael Wood-Lewis of Front Porch Forum.

In preparation for the event, Bill has spawned a lively comments thread from this post about Alan Turing's Big Idea, which has to do with the Internet's value in both storing and organizing information.

In thinking about the panel, I keep coming back to this observation: I feel like the "Vermont blogosphere" has contracted a bit. Or maybe it's just that I'm not as in the loop as I'd like to be? Whatever the reason, I've gotten fewer emails lately announcing new blogs, and I've noticed that a number of the blogs on my blogroll have either disappeared or been abandoned.

I have a hunch that more and more people are starting MySpace blogs, or sites they use to communicate with friends and family — Technorati says we're adding 175,000 blogs a day — but I feel like fewer and fewer people are starting up sites to communicate with the world at large. At least in our small corner of the world.

Is anyone else noticing this? Am I wrong?