Bored to death by the back-and-forth bickering of the presidential primary season? Never fear! Our web correspondent, Mark Boyer, brings us good news from the front. - Dorothee

It happens time and again on the campaign trail: a reporter digs up a tantalizing bit of gossip, and within hours the story picks up momentum, eventually creating an all-out feeding frenzy at the political trough. For the rest of the news cycle, nobody’s talking about “the issues” because every network is abuzz with Hillary Clinton’s Emotional Moment or a gaffe that might be interpreted – with a little suspension of disbelief – as racist. There are a lot of factors that can account for the herd mentality of the national press and the way they cover the electoral process, but above all, there are newspapers to sell and Nielsen Ratings to worry about.

Enter Purple States, a citizen journalism project that provides raw footage and commentary from a team of five hand-picked citizen journalists who explore the issues and candidates on the campaign trail using new media. The project was started by Cynthia Farrar, a Yale lecturer who has done similar work in the past with PBS. Several of the videos will be professionally edited and broadcast in key markets, and NYTimes.com is posting some of them on their Op-Ed page. The initial videos have a documentary quality to them, with the five citizens chatting with independent voters, interviewing the candidates, and giving their own running commentary of what they’re finding.

The coverage that these citizen journalists offer isn’t better or worse than national press coverage – it’s fundamentally different. The footage that they’ve produced so far is engaging, and they generally manage to point their cameras above the fray.

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