Over at NPR, Andy Carvin is leading a project to extend what we learned from Twitter Vote Report, launched by a humble blog post here on techPresident, to cover the upcoming inauguration weekend, January 17th through 20th, in DC.

Kevin: Mindy McAdams, cutting edge multimedia journalism professor. has these observations about video based on a recent study:
1. A shorter, extremely tight and fascinating video has more chance of being watched; it is more likely to succeed in communicating its message, because more people would finish watching it.
2. News sites need to put more effort into facilitation of this sampling behavior, and production of long items (videos or text) is counterproductive to that effort.

Kevin: This is one of those things that will take a little lateral thinking from journalists, but I hope that computer-assisted reporting vets will see, or possibly even be using something like R. When we're talking about ever increasing amounts of data, helping journalists help our readers make sense of it becomes even more important, and with this open-source language and the myriad of packages to developed by the community, it deserves further investigation by journalists.

Kevin: TV is still in a mass media, big money mode, and here is why it's ripe for disruption. "That's the problem with current web programming. On the one hand, you have old-school TV thinking: throw buckets of money at a slick production with huge names and then hope for millions of viewers so you can earn that money back. On the other, you have crazy shut-ins with access to video equipment. Neither, so far, is a very effective money-making scheme. (Leo) Laporte, I think, is the happy medium between "slick production" and "crazy shut-in." "