Screw the rules.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been asking a lot of people how news organizations can do a better job of providing and being a conduit for information and discussion while making enough money to sustain a business.

That last part is probably the most difficult question to answer. Most recently, media consultant Michael Rosenblum urged media companies to come up with a new business model for the realities of today.

Apparently, media CEOs were stymied. But there are examples out there:

David Cohn has proposed community-funded reporting and runs Spot.us, the live test. ProPublica uses the non-profit model to pay for investigative reporting. The Guardian in Britain is set up as a public trust.

So I ask you: what should we be doing to ensure there will be money to pay for the labor-intensive craft of news gathering?

Leave a comment below or send me your ideas. If the CEOs don’t know where to start, maybe we, the online collective can show the way.

I’ve been talking with people in social media, information visualization, grassroots reporting and news companies. I’ve wanted to talk with media buyers as well, but don’t have contacts. Do you?

Not related, but possibly useful to you: Thanks to the organizers of Capitolbeat, I was a conference panelist on a session about online fact checking with UNC assistant professor Andy Bechtel and staff reporter Taft Wireback of the News & Record in Greensboro, N.C. (You’ll find the links on my Delicious page.)

Photo: The (South Africa) Times newsroom by Gregor Rohrig/Flickr

Full transcript

Some sites will start their coverage early. Already, the massive, all-volunteer Twitter Vote Report has been logging and mapping voting problems and good experiences.

Most complaints so far have been about long wait times and registration confusion. To participate, send a tweet with the #votereport hashtag.

New to Twitter? Not on Twitter? There are other ways to send a report. Developer Nathan Freitas has come up with some additional ways to look through the data.

At 6 a.m. ET on Election Day, the Washington Post will begin tracking voter experiences and related national news on their Vote Monitor page. To participate and to send news tips, post a Twitter message to PostVoteMonitor.

In addition, WaPo has interactive maps, live discussions, blogging and articles peppered around its site and on their politics page. Be sure to have a look at the very cool TimeSpace map and timeline mashup.

The New York Times just announced a slew of goodies for election coverage. A very handy tool for those who want to jockey returns is the pop-up dashboard, which will include live election returns beginning at 6 p.m. ET, as well as electoral vote tallies from network news, CNN and the Associated Press.

The Grey Lady is also trying to create the largest online archive of polling place photographs taken by voters. Add your photo to the mix under a Creative Commons license on the Polling Places page.

Addicted to Flickr? Editors at Yahoo News will be culling election-related photos from the site and posting them on yahoo.com and news.yahoo.com. Put the word “election” somewhere in the title, comment or tag to be part of the search.

If you’re going to be out and about, bookmark the Online NewsHour’s mobile site. In addition to updates on the election, there’s a handy list of poll closing times and electoral votes.

NPR political analyst Ken Rudin has predicted Obama will win the race, but as we know, it ain’t over till it’s over. Want to map your own hypothetical outcome? Check out the You Predict map. The NewsHour will begin its TV broadcast at 9 p.m. ET, but you can follow developing coverage online now.

The Star-News may create the longest CoverItLive transcript ever with its Election Day live blog, which begins at 6:30 a.m. ET. The Wilmington, N.C., news organization reports record early voting returns in several counties. Thousands more are expected at the polls tomorrow.

STLToday.com, the website of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, will have their reporters and photographers out in force, documenting any polling problems that may occur. In addition, they’ll be streaming Qik video from separate Democratic and Republican election parties, blogging and posting staff and reader photos. The content will go live Tuesday afternoon. Keep tabs on the coverage at www.stltoday.com/news/politics.

On the West Coast, the popular L.A. Times blogs Top of the Ticket and L.A. Now will be posting updates throughout the day. Around 4 p.m. PT, the homepage will flip from the usual center art surrounded by story links to an electoral map that will track returns for the presidential race as well as 12 hotly contested propositions. Sometime after, the site will launch a separate section on California.

MSNBC will be revamping its homepage for elections coverage. Before then, you can embed a customizable live results widget like the one below on your site.

Photo by Hilary McHone/Flickr

While you may have thought you recognized familiar phrases, you can’t beat the evidence shown in this side-by-side-by-side edit from the broadcasts.

The video seems to support the notion that the debates were stump speeches that revealed little original and on-the-spot thought from either candidate. It’s disturbing to think our election process amounts to an overly long opportunity to sling mud and drum slogans into our heads.

(Link crossposted on Twitter)

In the least year or so, I’ve heard more marketers like Ian Schafer of Deep Focus and Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research refer to it.

As news organizations scramble to engage its readers, it may be time to study the manifesto once more. And this time, it may pay off to read how market researchers are changing their engagement strategies. A good place to start is Cluetrain at 10.

For those who like slideshows, here are the 95 theses of the original Cluetrain Manifesto:

Photo by eye2eye/Flickr

The unfortunate thing about these televised events it that they sounded a lot like stump speeches and talking points, rather than any real discussion of plans and intentions.

Impressions are all the voting public is left with, so I thought I’d publish a poll:

But what about when you’re not filming something on the scene? What about using video to tell a text and infographics story in a different way?

One of my favorite sources for this storytelling style is Good magazine, which I’ve subscribed to since its inception.

Have a look at the video below and see what you think. The camera motion and music draw you in, while the text and graphics give you a better grasp of how and why certain countries excel at certain Olympic sports.

You could watch on TV, of course, but what fun is that? Here are a few suggestions to make your viewing experience more engaging:

• Graphic designer Erica Smith, whose creative and prolific mind has come up with the oft-cited Paper Cuts newspaper layoffs mashup, has just launched Presidential Bingo. Pick your candidate or pundit and mark away.
• CurrentTV is again airing Hack the Debate. Watch on cable or online. If you’re on Twitter, include the hashtag #current somewhere in your message (at the end is good) and it’ll show up on the broadcast.
• Update: NPR has two engagement efforts on Twitter tonight:
  Fact check the debate: Think one of the candidates is wrong? Find a source that proves it and tweet the URL with the #factcheck hashtag. You can monitor fact checking here. Need more detailed instructions? NPR’s got em.
  Rate the Debate: Send a Twitter message with the hashtag #dialtest and monitor one of two ways: verbally and graphically on Plodt.

  To participate:

  1. Follow Plodt on Twitter.

  2. Tweet about the debate, ranking the candidates’ performance on a scale of 1 to 10. For instance:
  Let me be clear, I’m ambivalent. *Obama 5.3*

  If they use the words Main Street one more time, I’m going to slit my wrists. *McCain 1* *Obama 1*

  Take that, non-maverick! *McCain 6*

  There are further details on these projects if you need them.

• For more fact checking, PolitiFact.com, the Washington Posts’s Fact Checker live blog, which begins at 9 p.m. ET, and the post-debate wrap at FactCheck.org look promising.

Even if you can’t be at Belmont University, you can still be part of the action. Enjoy!

The actor, race car driver and philanthropist died Friday at his home in Westport, Conn., at the age of 83 after battling lung cancer.

Perhaps the most touching tribute comes from Newman’s Own, the food company founded by the actor and his author friend, A.E. Hotchner. While a journalistic approach would forbid the use of music, there’s a lot to be learned from the structure, simplicity and craft in the four-minute video below.