The Current perspective: another way to watch political coverage

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a story about how cable TV has become the go-to place for political coverage during the 2008 presidential campaign. My piece concentrated on the cable news networks, but the paradigm shift extends to other cable channels -- and their web counterparts as well. Niche networks are exploring what the campaign means for their audience, in a way their audience can relate to.

There's no better example than Current TV, an interactive cable net that concentrates on under-35 viewers. It's had a team of half a dozen or so young "collective journalists'' out on the campaign trail since the New Hampshire primary, looking at the race through twentysomething-eyes.

"Our focus is on issues important to young adults," says Andrew Fitzgerald, manager of the unit. "Our audience demographic is a major portion of the electorate that's underserved by traditional media outlets."

He's not talking about idiotic MTV-style reports on boxers or briefs, but covering the real issues from a different perspective.

"Our audience certainly shares the concerns of other age groups, it just has a different take on them," says Fitzgerald, 27. "Our demo is the age group that has the highest percentage fighting in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That makes it uniquely personal to them. They have a unique perspective on health care, too, because so many of them are recent college graduates who don't have full time jobs, so they don't have access to health insurance."

Current tailors its coverage to that audience perspective.

"For instance, we've paid a lot of attention on the retiring of the Baby Boomer generation will affect this younger generation behind it -- financially, socially, every other way," Fitzgerald notes. "We had a package of stories asking our contributors to show us, in 60 seconds, the debt they've already accrued, the generational debt. This generation is steeped in credit-card debt and student-loan debt. How will that affect the landscape in an election year?"

When Hillary Clinton unveiled her proposal on universal health care, most political reporters concentrated on the cost. Fitzgerald's staff instead looked at how that cost would be borne -- by younger, healthier workers forced to buy insurance to subsidize their older counterparts.

"Her plan would coerce people into buying health insurance," points out Fitzgerald. ‘‘Many young adults don't feel like they need health insurance. That wasn't a point made in many news reports."

The work of Current's reporters is supplemented by the audience itself, which also provides much of the network's content on other subjects as well. Many stories (or pods, as the channel refers to them) are collaborations between members of the audience and Current reporters -- hence the word collective.

"Collective journalism is our citizen journalism effort," says Fitzgerald. "The way that citizen journalism has been treated in recent years on news channels is to focus on the gotcha video, the off-guard moment caught by somebody on their cellphone. That's what CNN's iReport is, videos from people who happen to be at the scene of breaking news before a news camera crew gets there.

"Collective journalism is more of a network-journalism model. We work with contributors around the world to tell stories as a group. Reporters from, say, The Miami Herald are journalists, who work on a story from start to finish and have the skills necessary to do so. We're not asking that of all our contributors. Some are talented freelance journalists, but some are college students getting a degree in engineering who happen to have access to part of a story that they share with our audience."

Current got off to a slow start, distribution-wise, when it was launched by Al Gore and others three years ago. But it's now available in more than 50 million homes via cable and both big satellite-TV systems. Or you can check out some of the political stories on its website -- or even just watch an episode of its satirical series The Democratic Messiah, in which Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama ask God rather than the voters to choose a nominee, right here: