Demise of the daily newspaper. Okay, I get it.

The Raleigh News & Observer is a venerable paper with a long history of excellent investigative reporting and excellent voter education. In fact, I wasn’t too upset when the branch let drop its traditional voter guide for the county commissioners election — the paper would publish candidate profiles and more, just as in past years, right?

Well, I’m not so sure.

The paper is no longer locally owned, but was purchased by the McClatchy company a few years ago — a good syndicate, as syndicates go, but it does mean there are outside influences at work. Times are not happy in newsrooms these days — and the current storyline in Doonesbury hits a bit too close to home with the retirement of Pat Stith, longtime investigative reporter. The paper’s management seemed to be making the best of a bad economic situation, and while the paper on newsprint has been getting smaller and smaller the online resources were still there, weren’t they?

Well, maybe not.

In previous election cycles, I could go to newsobserver.com/elections or some such and find a well organized collection of resources – lists of candidates, candidate profiles, and more. Try to find that now… All I could get to was a blog-like listing of articles (sort of) related to the election. [Mea culpa. That’s probably what www.aauwnc.org looks like to someone who clicks on one of its categories. Has the blog paradigm so quickly destroyed more careful information architechture?] Looking for the backup on the endorsements they’ve already published on the county commissioners’ race turned up very little. [The early endorsement makes me wonder if they’ll be publishing their comprehensive voter guide the weekend before the election — or if they’re assuming that the change to early-voting will make that too little, too late, so not worth doing.]

Okay, it’s a complex election — president, senator, governor, and (weird as it is) nine members of the governor’s cabinet as well as the US House, state legislators, and local races. But has the paper really given up providing the kind of comprehensive coverage that it gave us in the past? And replaced it with things like triangle.com?

Ah, well.

Note to self: beef up rwc.aauwnc.org with more election resources.

I’m not usually paranoid, but..

A couple of things this election season have me a wondering what’s going on beneath the surface.

I made a political donation through a 527 organization last week and got a call from CitiBank wondering about the “unusual activity on my credit card.” Not life threatening of course — but in some households it might have been cause for concern. Did the particular target of the donation make a difference here? [It certainly wasn’t the amount of the donation, more’s the pity.]

News this morning about an increase in traffic fatalities on election day (e.g. article from news.health.com which gives source as a letter in Oct. 1 Journal of American Medical Association — I can’t find original source). Now encouraging safe driving is always a good thing — but the timing of the announcement? How will it affect efforts to help people get to the polls?

As I said, I’m not usually paranoid… Anyone else seeing an uptick in weirdness?

Early voting handout

The Wake County Board of Elections site has a great online application for folks to find out about early voting locations and schedules — but I can’t find a one-page info sheet to post on bulletin boards, handout to neighbors, etc., etc.

Here’s my proposal: PDF | Excel (updated 10/3)

If you’ve got comments, corrections, or suggestions on how to better display this data or links to somewhere this data has already been posted, please let me know.