‘No man is an island, entire of itself’, wrote the poet Donne, a sentiment which, albeit in a more prosaic form, might be said to encapsulate the social media policy of most American news corporations in the run-up to tomorrow’s Presidential election. Never before has the coverage of polling day itself, let alone the result, been so hotly anticipated, and many of the larger news organizations have attempted to codify in advance their social media strategy for the big day – chief amongst which seems to be the guiding principle that, in the words of the Associated Press, ‘people view all of us as speaking for the AP’. In their online presence on Twitter and Facebook, therefore, journalists must locate a delicate balance between their dual roles as individual and representative, as both personality and employee. Whilst social media so often acts as the shot of adrenaline reviving the groggy and often lifeless body politic, such a fusion of individuality with a larger collaborative responsibility is nonetheless fraught with danger for professional journalists.

‘The buck stops with Candy’, screamed the US’s Fox News; ‘Candy Crowley sides with Obama’, fulminated the UK’s Daily Mail. Such a reaction from two well-known conservative media outlets in response to moderator Candy Crowley’s performance in last night’s second US presidential debate seems both unsurprising and unremarkable, given both the innately problematic nature of the job and her own prior indications of how she would complete it. The tussle between those who proclaim their journalistic impartiality and those who assert the presence of political bias is as old as the hills; given her unapologetically robust analysis of the role beforehand – ‘to give the conversation direction and get the questions answered’ – controversy was perhaps inevitable.

This U.S. presidential election season, The Washington Post, NPR and the Sunlight Foundation are inviting developers to delve into their APIs* and show off some of the wild things they can do with data during a weekend-long Election Hackathon.

The challenge is open to any developer who lives in the United States and will be in the vicinity of Washington, D.C. from October 6-7, 2012. Participants are expected to build unique web or mobile applications that illuminate aspects of the presidential race using data from The Washington Post’s newly available APIs, as well as those of NPR, the Sunlight Foundation (a transparency non-profit) and any other sources they can find.

The free hackathon will apparently include six meals and 26 hours of frenzied app building, which can be undertaken either solitarily or in a team of up to five people. Programmers are welcome to explore the APIs in advance, but cannot start on their apps until after registration and bagels on Saturday morning.