Elections and new media

We've been taking note of newspapers' efforts to involve new media in their pre-election coverage:

The Northwest Herald has videotaped its endorsement interviews in several high-profile contests, and posted them online. Here's an example.

The Rockford Register Star's election site includes a searchable database of campaign contributions. Users can search by candidate, ZIP code or name of donor.

The Beacon News in Aurora partnered with CBS-2 for debates of 14th District congressional candidates. CBS on-air anchors moderated the debates. The Beacon News did streaming video of the debates and live-blogged during them. Then they did a three-editor panel analysis ("who won," etc.) right after the debates, which corresponded with the print analysis. They had videotaped their in-house endorsement interviews, then divided the videotape into little video snippets of each candidate on each topic -- again corresponding to charts in print.
For a Kaneland school referendum, the Beacon News took people into the schools to show thecrowding, via video by Heather Eidson -- but also interviewed people who represent the "no" side of the issue.
"Just amazing stuff," says editor and publisher Rick Nagel. "The thing I like best is how well we're using print to tease to more online, and online to tease to print."
Here's the link. From the homepage, click "video" under "Web Only."