2012 is presidential election year in the US and election fever has already started.
Starting with the caucases, continuing with the primaries and with their eyes already on the presidential race ending in November 2012, newspapers are getting ready.

"Election coverage is bigger than any one newsroom" so the right approach should be teaming up to be able to assure the coverage is as wide and accurate as possible, some believe. Or at least this is what NBC News and Newsweek/Daily Beast have decided to do in view of the upcoming presidential battle. Shared content will appear on the Newsweek pages and online on The Daily Beast.

The decision isn't surprising in itself, Justin Ellis wrote on NiemanLab. Double the resources, double the coverage, double the audience. Also, he explains, looking back to past electoral experience, this is not even new, quoting as examples the Times and CBS News or ABC News and The Washington Post partnering on polls.

The Plain Dealer newspaper announced earlier this week it has formed a partnership with the PolitiFact Ohio. This is the latest growth to the national PolitiFact network, which now consist of PolitiFact Florida (Miami Herald), PolitiFact Texas (Austin American-Statesman), PolitiFact Georgia (Atlanta Journal Constitution), and PolitiFact Rhode Island (Providence Journal). On a national scale, NPR and ABC News have also partnered with PolitiFact.

PolitiFact originated in St. Petersburg, Florida in 2007. It was designed to cross reference statements made by politicians, divulging further into the background details behind their statements. The website assists each statement by asking the basic questions "How do you know that and what are your sources?" After the initial assessment of the statement, PolitiFact labels the statement on a "Truth-O-Meter" scale from True, Mostly True, Half True, Barely True, False and the worst rating at Pants on Fire.

With the European elections looming, a new site detailing the background, experience and policies of nearly all the candidates across Europe has just been launched. In conjunction with Touteleurope.fr and TV5 Monde, miCandidate.eu is based on an idea which started in Ireland, listing the profiles of all 400 candidates in the 2007 elections.

The site also provides an alternative - and much more cost effective - campaign platform for politicians, who can use the site to recruit volunteers and accept donations. From a news perspective, the profiles are shared with "dozens of popular websites", providing news sites with more comprehensive information on the European candidates.

Source: MiCandidate

Journalist Michael Smerconish describes the shortage of hard news and investigative journalism as leaving the always-expanding number of news outlets, from 24-hour cable networks and blogs, "scrambling for anything they can parrot to a hungry audience."

Smerconish brings up the "fake McCain advisor" incident of the 2008 presidential election as proof.

When Martin Eisenstadt, the "Borat of the campaign season," a character created by aspiring filmmakers Eitan Gorlin and Dan Miryish "in their quest to get a TV show," taken seriously as a political pundit, reporting rumors that were taken as fact by the likes of Fox News and the Los Angeles Times, it displayed a larger problem that happens in an age of newsroom downsizing, Smerconish says.

A Variety column by Brian Lowry observed that "shrinking print coverage threatens to trigger a 'domino effect' as news operations downsize, feeding the strange Internet age conundrum where there's more information - courtesy of blogs and the Web - but less real news, especially as it pertains to backyard issues."

"Those who report the news are a dying breed, even in the Internet world," Smerconish says, even using himself as an example. His use of newspapers as sources for his own live, "current-events-driven" radio show doesn't require his reporting, but a repetition of the news and often his own opinion.