Publish2 Blog

Publish2 Election News Network

The Publish2 Election News Network is a network of newsrooms, journalists, freelancers, and network-affiliated bloggers collaborating to find the best election coverage leading up to the November elections.

Using Publish2’s web-based bookmarking tool, participants bookmark interesting and informative election stories from across the web. Publish2 aggregates these bookmarks and produces headline feeds that can be published on participant websites.

We kicked started the network for the February 5 “Super Tuesday” primary, but will be continuing through the November election (and beyond).

Interested in participating? Here are instructions for newsrooms — it’s not hard! If you’re a journalist or freelancer covering politics, you can register here.

Here are some examples of how participants are leveraging the Publish2 Election News Network:

KnoxNews Logo

Knoxnews.com organized a group of journalists and affiliated bloggers (Knoxville Blog Network) to gather interesting election stories leading up to and after the February 5 Tennessee primary elections. Knoxnews.com is publishing the headline feed to supplement their own coverage with other stories from around the region and around the web:

KnoxNews Publish2

The result is an innovative collaboration between journalists and citizen journalists to bring voters a wider view of election news. Here are the participants, including Knoxville Blog Network bloggers (some left, some right):

Here’s what Jack Lail wrote about it on knoxnews.com:

Here’s the best Tennessee election coverage that can be found on the Internet.

A bold statement, but arguably true.

I’m changing up this weekend’s blog roundup to list not what bloggers are posting, but links that bloggers are bookmarking. Think of it as read what they’re reading.

A small group of Tennessee bloggers and journalists are experimenting with a new way of organizing election news in something called the “Publish2 Election News Network.”

It’s a groundbreaking experiment in group collaboration to cover the election and it is happening in Tennessee first.

Thenewstribune Logo

Mark Briggs at Thenewstribune.com (and also of Journalism 2.0 fame) got an election news aggregation launched literally overnight:

Thenewstribune Publish2

Here’s how Mark describes it on that page:

Here’s a roundup of the best Washington election coverage that can be found on the web. It’s the product of a social bookmarking experiment where journalists from The News Tribune and other area newspapers collaborate with political bloggers and others to compile a reading list of coverage from all around the web.

And here’s Mark’s post on the initiative.

Herald News Logo

Tom Meagher and the team at Herald News produced a great NJ election news feed on their main site and their election blog.

MyHeraldTribune Publish2

For Newsrooms

Here’s are instructions for newsrooms that would like to participate the Publish2 Election News Network:

  • Round up a group a editors, journalists, and freelancers or affiliated bloggers (e.g. part of your blogger network — we’re aiming to balance left and right)
  • Get them all to register for a free Publish2 account — http://publish2.com/register
  • Get them to install our browser buttons or toolbar — http://beta.publish2.com/install
  • Agree on a common tag, e.g. KnoxNews.com is using “tnelection”
  • Starting this weekend and running through next week, get everyone to bookmark interesting election coverage — from ANY source — for your state or from around the country
  • Makes sure everyone uses the common tag on their bookmarks (along with any others)
  • Publish2 generates feeds of headlines for each tag
  • We’ll give you some javascript to publish the headlines on your site — our just take the feeds yourself

If you’d like to try using Publish2 for election news — or for any other editorial product — please contact me at scott.karp at publish2 dot com