Making politics interactive – and fun?

“History” in discussions of news Webs sites means looking back less than a decade. In this case the political coverage of three major news sites in 2004 and 2006 is about as far back as we need to look for perspective.

The panel for the second presentation includes Jason Manning, political editor at WashingtonPost.com; Amy Cox, special projects assignment producer at CNN.com; and Rachel Nixon, deputy world editor at BBCNews.com.

The biggest changes in just those two years between 2004 and 2006 was the explosion of blogging and the increase in interactive features on these sites.

CNN.com allowed users, not just pundits, to score debates and showed the average scores given to each candidate. BBCNews.com had a baseball graphic to explain the American elections process. WashingtonPost.com took the cake on this one, though, with a “March Madness"-style feature, Midterm Madness, that allowed users to predict winners for every congressional race. Surprisingly, 4,000 users actually submitted their predictions, and the lucky winner was about 4 or 5 races off, Manning said.

The various uses of the U.S. map were really fascinating, and there might be a whole field of study there - how the map of the country has become a powerful visual in representing the political views of the United States.

It was heartening to see these editors focused on getting users to their sites and interested in and informed about politics. Isn’t this the goal of a free press in the first place?