In an interesting collaboration among new (and old) media, Yahoo, Slate magazine (owned by Washington Post), and blogger/citizen journalism supersite The Huffington Post are comming together to host the first ever presidential debates on the web. Sometime after Memorial Day, Democrats and Republicans will take to the web in separate debates in what seems to be something like last night’s Democratic event on MSNBC. Read the Press release from Yahoo.

Validation of the politcal viability of the net? Maybe.
Opportunity for branding coverage of politics on the web? Definitely.

As video capabilities on cell-phones become more ubiquitous, the essense of the news is changing. Quality is going up, price is going down. What does is mean once anyone can record high-quality video essentially undercover? Joe Blow meets James Bond and we’ll never see Seinfeld the same again.

Michael Richards in a West Hollywood comedy club and the authorities in Iraq who executed
Saddam Hussein painfully learned that the prying eyes of television news can belong to anyone who carries a cell phone.

Saddam’s execution and Richards’ flameout illustrate the growing power of cell-phone video as a news tool, not only to supplement stories but to change them.

“It brought to a fore the sense that wow, this is a ubiquitous technology,” said Mark Lukasiewicz, NBC News vice president for digital media. “Cameras are now in places where cameras never used to be. That’s transformational.”

From AP on Yahoo News