A collective groan

The American election provided some great examples of online journalism. MSNBC produced an interactive map showing which areas had the biggest problems with voting (which was wiped just as I was drafting this - images to come) complete with the previous election's results in those areas. Interestingly, the areas with most (recorded) problems tended to vote Democrat. Their Citizen Journalist pages also recorded voter reactions to the day and there was a blog recording the whole process in real-time.

Cursor.org recorded the whole thing beautifully, including the fact that:

"International election monitors in Florida told the International Herald Tribune that they "had less access to polls than in Kazakhstan, that the electronic voting had fewer fail-safes than in Venezuela, that the ballots were not so simple as in the Republic of Georgia and that no other country had such a complex national election system." Plus: 'Foreign monitors barred from some US polling stations.'"

The collective groan around the world at Bush's reelection was recorded best on the BBC site, while The Daily Mirror's hilarious front page ("How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?") was backed up with such subtle journalism as God help America.