I'm at the Knight Digital Media Center (USC based) here in LA at a training for a few dozen journalists. It's a very impressive group of so-called ‘experts' and journalists who are soaking in the latest in web reporting, analysis, tools, databases and using the web to involve citizens, to enhance their political coverage this year.

This morning's panel on new forms of reporting has some really interesting insights (live-blogging here so forgive any typos or errors).

There is a real appetite for innovative approaches to politics on the web, says Matthew Wait, news technologist from St. Pete Times who starts his presentation by saying that he hates politics. When you don't have a team of seven like the Times does, he suggests crowd sourcing, particularly for local politics. Check out Twine as a local politics meme watcher; Google Docs as a Source Collector. Twitter. Think election day problems for the latter. Long discussion about Polifact which has matured a lot since I first checked it out.

Aron Pilhofer says the NY Times where he leads a team of seven (!) journalist developer types, to work on news-focused, data-drive projects; e.g. ‘web development' at newsroom speed. (I like that! Really like that.)