Don't get me wrong, Scoop08 is an ambitious project and its founders deserve to be lauded. Their plan, to recruit hundreds, if not thousands of student/citizen/journalists to cover the 08 presidential race in a novel manner is fantastic. They claim that their

coverage will transcend horse-race politics, focusing instead on the substance — the characters behind the candidates, the big ideas behind the rhetoric, the trends behind the headlines.

I wish them much success and hope that they succeed. Their list of advisors is spectacular, the site itself is clean and professional, and the have an editorial board comprised of promising student/journalists in place.

What I object to is that this piece offers one rather simple tech story arc while simultaneously hinting around at a much more interesting political story that it never fully develops. First the story arc -- (1) there is a new ambitious website that taps into the free labor of student/journalists to produce content for young voters (2) the youth vote has become proportionally more important in recent elections (3) young folks use cool multimedia and social networking sites (4) this site will use nifty multimedia and and therefore has the potential to shake things up. A bit simple, but fine. The author even offers the reader this parachute should Scoop08 fail:

Whether the venture sky-rockets or fizzles, its very existence reflects a social shift that candidates and major parties ignore at their peril.

Namely, America's young voters, traditionally seen as apathetic, are becoming more active voters - and there are more and more of them.

Now this is quite a statement. I'm willing to overlook the fact that the piece claims that the "very existence" of Scoop08, one solitary website in its infancy, is an indicator of a monumental social shift that profoundly affects American politics. Tech writing is often littered with breathless "next-big-thing" statements that are speculative but ultimately plausible.

The political story begins with the second part of this statement. Young voters are voting in increasing numbers and are therefore and increasingly important demographic for politicians and parties to court. This is where the piece takes an interesting turn.

Rock the Vote's research suggests that the increased youth vote played into the results in several tight races in 2006, including Democratic senate gains in Montana and Virginia.

The author goes on to quote a Pew Research Survey that reports that young voters overwhelmingly identify as Democrats (58% in a 2006 poll) compared with a generation ago (55% of the same demographic identified as Republican). So what does all of this mean? Apparently, issues like Iraq, as well as the environment, global warming and immigration drive young voters to the polls. Go figure. Young people like interactive political events like the YouTube debate and use social networking sites. Double Great. And so what?

Presenting these two stories, the tech story and the political story, in a single package, the author invites the reader to leap to the conclusion that the Scoop08 site, with its potential to increase young voter turn-out will help Democratic candidates win elections in 2008. The problem is that the author never gets around to saying so, either because she is nervous about going out on a limb and stating that Scoop08 will have a direct political effect or because the entire article is hung on the flimsy peg of some wishful thinking regarding one nascent student-run website and a bunch of stats about youth voting trends. My vote is for the latter.

Why conflate the arguably interesting story about Scoop08 with some half-baked political conjecture? To enhance the impact factor? To fill column inches? To make a speculative story about a cool website seem relevant? Who knows? But it would nice to get through an election cycle with more reporting on the actual impact of technology on the political process. While it is certainly possible that Scoop08 will revolutionize the upcoming political cycle, I'd rather have a simple piece about the site's inception now and a report on its impact -- once it has accomplished something. It is time to break free from the temptation to view each new site, service, or network through the frame of "the next-big-thing" and realize that most new media advances are incremental and many sites, services, and networks are niche players that never achieve paradigm-busting market share or political power, and should be appreciate as such.