Best Tools to Cover the News: Hurricane Sandy and the Presidential Election

Hurricane Sandy

The New York Times

The New York Times: Assessing the Damage From Hurricane Sandy – The New York Times posted interactive infographics the morning after the storm indicating areas that were experiencing power failures, fires, floods and more. The visualized data topics included Subways and Busses, Power Failures, Tunnels, Trains, and Airports, Wastewater, Flooding, Fires, and Wind.

Tumblr: Sandy on Tumblr: Beating the Hurricane Blues – Users are being encouraged to follow the relief effort as it is documented across Tumblr.  With Hurricane Sandy-related links to “Cool Tumblrs Doing Cool Things” for relief efforts, “Hurricane Sandy Tumblrs,” and “Media Tumblrs,” Storyboard, an editorial Tumblr page that a regularly features talented creators and their work, is making an effort to tell the stories of Hurricane Sandy though words, pictures, video, music, charts, animation, and any other voice their “creators” choose to speak with.

“We want to recognize a few of the people and organizations doing amazing work related to Sandy, and we want to make it clear the credit for that work rests entirely with them. Obviously this is just a tiny fraction of the massively diverse and positive response; for more, be sure to check out the Hurricane Sandy tag, and check back for ongoing coverage on Storyboard.”

Busy Schedules Divert UAlbany Students from Voting

Image courtesy of The University at Albany

According to some University at Albany students, busy schedules have kept and will keep many students from voting in tomorrow’s presidential election between candidates Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

Greg Lockhart, a senior Economics major at UAlbany, says he is not voting in tomorrow’s presidential election.  “I didn’t get my shit together in time to submit my absentee ballot,” says Lockhart, 22.  “And my vote won’t make a difference in New York anyway.”

Courtney Clarke, a 23-year-old Communications major from Seattle, is also not voting in tomorrow’s presidential election on account of a busy schedule.  “I’m pretty sure I’m registered but I never got the ballot,” says Clarke.  “All of a sudden it’s the election and I never sent in my vote.”  Although Clarke has never previously voted on account of feeling educationally “inadequate,” she has been keeping herself informed during this election season, watching the debates and following news apps on her iPhone.

Patrick Haggerty, a fellow Journalism student at UAlbany, says he will be voting in tomorrow’s election despite having work and school because it’s the first time he will be of age to vote and because he feels strongly about his choice in candidate.  “I think Obama is going to win not just because I want him to, but because I think the amount of people who dislike Obama is less than the amount of people who dislike Romney,” says Haggerty, 21.

Social Media & the Final Presidential Debate

Watching the debates is no longer a passive exercise for the American public.

Although I watched the final 2012 presidential debate on CSPAN’s TV channel, a number of sites hosted live streaming of the debates from the web.

Ustream livestreamed the debate via PBS NewsHour and CBS News.  Various Ustream channels also offered other options for watching and interacting with the debate, including coverage of protests outside the debate halls, commentary from “Show Interrupted’s” Hooter Girls, a drinking debate livestream, and other debate panels.

Instagram takes a look inside NewsHour’s foreign policy team’s debate coverage HERE.

Mashable, a leading online source for news, information and resources for the “Connected Generation”, hosted their own live blog and live stream of the debate on YouTube, including comments from a panel of experts and “viral content hunters.”

YouTube itself, in partnership with ABC, livestreamed the debate worldwide for free.  Various news networks including The New York Times and Al Jazeera provided live, online analysis.

Instead of live-streaming the debate, Tumblr, a popular blogging site in which I personally blog from, live-GIFed the presidential debate.  Having teamed up with The Guardian to further GIF reporting as a successfully innovative form of Journalism, Tumblr live-GIFed debate coverage at Gifwich and across dashboards everywhere.

Second Screen: Live Tweeting The Debate 10/16/12

Although I have live tweeted debates and nationally televised events in the past, I usually pay more attention to the tweets and status updates of others than to the production of my own updates.  This time however, I focused more on participating in the online conversation surrounding the second 2012 Presidential Debate.

Joe Biden and the VP Debate – Was he right to laugh?

I recently posted a status (post-VP debate) on Facebook that received some interesting attention from a fellow friend’s mother.  I responded to her comment as I saw fit, but the news surrounding Joe Biden’s demeanor during last Thursday’s Vice Presidential debate did not wane.

The next day, I stumbled upon this Rolling Stone article supporting Biden’s behavior.  Matt Taibbi writes,

The Romney/Ryan platform makes sense, and is not laughable, in only one context: if you’re a multi-millionaire and you recognize that this is the only way to sell your agenda to mass audiences. But if you’re not one of those rooting gazillionaires, you should laugh, you should roll your eyes, and it doesn’t matter if you’re the Vice President or an ABC reporter or a toll operator. You should laugh, because this stuff is a joke, and we shouldn’t take it seriously.

I found so much truth in this article.  Biden was not only aggressive in order to stand up for what is right and essentially inherent to American citizenship, but also because Ryan’s responses, plans, and overall stance on the Vice Presidency is so laughably faulty.

Taibbi goes on to comment on Journalism and its moral commitment to objective reporting:

Sometimes in journalism I think we take the objectivity thing too far. We think being fair means giving equal weight to both sides of every argument. But sometimes in the zeal to be objective, reporters get confused. You can’t report the Obama tax plan and the Romney tax plan in the same way, because only one of them is really a plan, while the other is actually not a plan at all, but an electoral gambit.

Although many took Joe Biden’s demeanor and behavior during the Vice Presidential election to be rude and condescending, I found it most heartening to know that there are still a few politicians out there willing to stand up for the American people.  Or at least, they’re willing to pretend they care about the American people.  So for that, I thank you, Joe Biden.  Thank you.

Election Infographic: The 2012 Presidential Election in Social Media Statistics

Check out my interactive infographic on the candidates’ use of social media HERE!