Online campaign coverage that "respects voters intelligence" "serves their curiosity" CLICK THIS TEXT TO VISIT THIS BLOG'S CURRENT SITE

Amy Gahran assesses PolitiFact (a collaboration of St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly, both of which are owned by Poynter) in this Poynter Online item. Here's Matt Waite, the site's creator, writing about it.

According to Gahran, the primary feature of the site is that it "...pulls the rhetoric apart into components that can be examined, analyzed, and compared." Later, she writes,

The site's focus on structured information is anything but dry -- in fact, it allows for a lot of fun. But what I like most about Politifact is that it respects voters' intelligence and serves their curiosity by giving them informational "Lincoln Logs" from which they can assemble their own meaning and conclusions. This is accentuated by the way you can browse the site by data types: candidate, subject, venue, etc.

More about PolitiFact from its About page:

Journalists and researchers from the Times and CQ will fact-check the accuracy of speeches, TV ads, interviews and other campaign communications. We’ll publish new findings every day on PolitiFact.com, and list our sources for all to see.

PolitiFact (pronounced puh-lit’-eh-fact) is bolder than previous journalistic fact-checking efforts because we’ll make a call, declaring whether a claim is True, Mostly True, Half True, Barely True or False. We even have a special category for the most ridiculous claims that we call “Pants on Fire.”

It's still a long way to November 2008. Sounds like PolitiFact has enough time to work out kinks, but will it keep up its stamina - often the biggest problem for Internet-based projects like this.