Election season is coming

That’s meant as a joke, as it already seems to have gone along for, oh, 42 years.

A certain weekly paper here scoffed at our lack of local election coverage, including on the Web. Seeing as how the ballots don’t go out for 3-4 weeks, I feel the criticism was a bit…premature.

What we plan for Decision 2008 at KTVZ.COM is as much live streaming video as MSNBC offers up, tons of CNN and NBC video, and a page chock full of links to candidate and measure Websites, election info from counties and parties, etc., as well as a robust calendar of election-related events (forums and the like) and a billboard with lots of unedited announcements from candidates and campaigns of every stripe).

Oh, and a constantly updated stream of political headlines from AP, blogs from Politico.com – lots of fun stuff, some on the site already, much more to come.

I’d promise to post EVERY news release, but you should see how many we’re getting from the Smith and Merkley campaigns alone. I’d never get any news written!

But we’ll definitely ramp up in coming weeks, giving you a place to turn and seek out information galore. And of course, our local election features will include article comments, and those ought to get really interesting. And they’ll also be a big test of my now-stronger efforts to keep the tone civil and to bounce offensive comments that violate the Terms of Service.

Election Night, we’ll scroll the results through the night and take advantage of frequent news breaks in NBC’s presidential election coverage to tell you who’s up, who’s down and what’s what.

It oughta be a blast!;-)