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Welcome to Election 2.0.
Today, The Globe and Mail launches a new political hub on globeandmail.com dedicated to one of the things we cover best: politics. Truth be known, we were planning this announcement for later in the month. But Stephen Harper has persuaded us to go early.
The creation of the site is intended to ensure that the excellence The Globe and Mail has demonstrated in reporting and commenting on national politics ever since the political reformer and Father of Confederation, George Brown, founded the paper in 1844 will extend further into the digital world. A screen is obviously not a sheet of paper nor is an electron the same as ink. These are two different forms of media and therefore they furnish us different tools for telling our stories.
Our political website will be more immediate and interactive. It will be able to dig deeper and tell stories through text, photos, interactive graphics, podcasts and video.
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But the part that excites me the most is that the reader gets to participate: with the journalists, the newsmakers and with each other.
As a badly addled political junkie of long-standing, I can remember too many nights in university dormitories and other places where I found myself ultimately alone watching the endgame of a campaign. Everyone else had gone home by the political equivalent of the seventh inning.
No more isolation, my political friends. You can interact with one another night and day on the site. You can subject yourself to some of our quizzes on the games part of the site; read our bloggers; expose yourself to our political strategists. You can even submit your own political cartoons.
We want this to be a one-stop shop for anyone interested in Canadian politics. So we will aggregate news from other media sources and we will compile all the election polls in the public realm and provide you with a running tally in our Poll of Polls. We have also invited the pollsters to explain their pulse-takings.
We'd like to know what you think, too. This is meant to be your site. We'll provide the food and drinks. The address is www.globeandmail.com/politics. Or if you're in the neighbourhood – on the home page – you can follow the links. Come join us in a lively national conversation. No reason to spend the election alone.
