Do you remember your first time?
I’m talking, of course, about voting.
For me, it was 1976, Jimmy Carter vs. Gerald Ford. I was a junior at Penn State, earning beer money covering the local city council for the school daily and still feeling my way at it. Now, I was being asked to help decide the future of our nation. Although I was more politically aware than most of my peers, I felt completely unqualified for the task – the same way I would feel 13 years later when the hospital sent me home with my infant son.
This year, my son and my twin daughters will be voting in their first presidential race. So, too, is my friend Paul Zingone, who shoots video for this site. I decided to try to capture the passion, angst and confusion among this new generation of voters and to provide them a way to educate themselves about the issues before they step into the voting booth.
Thus, the TreeHouse Media Project is about to launch a website for these first-time voters. It will include interviews, summaries of the candidates’ positions on the issues and links to interactive features (e.g. the Wall Street Journal’s Electoral Compass) and truth-squad sites such as factcheck.org and Snopes. (No, that’s not really Sarah Palin toting the gun in the flag bikini.) If we can figure out how to do it in time, we’ll also solicit user-generated video.
Surprisingly, few major news organizations offer comprehensive side-by-side comparisons of the candidates’ positions. NPR has a terrific series of audio reports and articles. The New York Times and CNN have comprehensive sites. But USA Today has comparisons of only six issues. And I haven’t been able to find any comprehensive issue comparisons on the sites of the Washington Post (though they do have an excellent fact-check blog), Newsweek, Time, the L.A. Times or the Wall Street Journal.
That was one rationale for embarking on this project. The other: doing a site for a potential audience of 13 million – the number of people coming of voting age this presidential cycle – would give us an opportunity to learn some guerrilla/tipping point/social media marketing skills.
Yes, we will embarrass ourselves along the way. At an Obama voter registration rally in Philadelphia – my inaugural attempt at shooting video – all but 17 minutes of the 40-minute tape was either black (must remember to open the lens cover) or of my feet (must remember to shut off the camera, also). I only botched one interview on my second shoot, at a McCain-Palin rally at Lehigh University last week (though there are several inartfully-framed shots, a consequence of using a light, consumer camcorder and of attempting to film people while walking).
You, dear readers, will be able to read about our successes and failures in near-real time. (Those of you taking our web-based WordPress class – beginning Wednesday Oct. 15 – will see it in real-time, as I ask instructor Brandon Maddox for help in designing and troubleshooting the site.)
I’m willing to risk embarrassment because I hope we’ll all learn from the experiment. So come by the construction site at http://my1sttime.treehouse-media.net/ and tell us what we’re doing wrong. Suggest ideas on how we can promote the site. Old-media dinosaurs like me need guides.
Or watch this spot for an announcement of our formal launch and for updates on our marketing efforts.
And don’t forget to vote.
