The Truth-O-Meter
PolitiFact has expanded to Texas. The St. Petersburg Times product won the first Pulitzer Prize for online last year and is a promising new form of journalism that “marries old-fashioned reporting with the power of the Web.” PolitiFact Texas will rate the accuracy of statements by public officials in Texas. Much of the site’s coverage will focus on the 2010 elections in Texas, particularly the race for governor.
It’s exciting to watch this kind of innovation online expand. And I’d like to think that it bodes well for innovative analytical journalists whose work can be expanded in a dynamic way on the Web.
I’m highlighting a piece written by Jack McElroy, editor of the Knoxville News Sentinel, who called the awarding of PolitiFact the Pulitzer as “the most unusual, and most important, Pulitzer Prize” that year.
McElroy writes:
Online databases are rapidly becoming one of the important tools of watchdog journalism in the digital age. Identifying PolitiFact as the best national reporting of the year will only speed that trend.”
I had the pleasure of sitting in briefly on a programming class for journalists at an Investigative Reporters and Editors conference last year that was co-taught by the architect of PolitiFact, Matt Waite. I was beside myself as I listened to him tell the story of how he was able to convince his editors at the St. Pete paper to free him up from the day-to-day reporting so he could learn how to program. It was an impressive, up-by-the-bootstraps kinda story.
Congrats to Waite and all those at the St. Pete for their hard work paying off.
Via prweb.com
