Students who have difficulty finding time to follow the upcoming presidential election take note: An entirely student-run, politically-minded web site will soon provide an accessible forum for election news and coverage.

TheScoop08.com — which is scheduled to launch in August — will be a student blog with a staff comprised exclusively of politically-involved high school and college students.

Co-founded by Andrew Mangino, a sophomore at Yale, and Alexander Heffner, a high school junior at Phillips Academy, the web site will be a go-to source for all students: Those who are politically active can contribute to the site, while their less knowledgeable peers can visit the site for information about the election.

“TheScoop08.com has the potential to be to the 2008 election what the live television debate was to the 1960 election, in which John F. Kennedy gained tremendous amounts of popularity by playing to the camera, upstaging a withdrawn Richard Nixon,” said Mangino, who is also president and editor-in-chief of the site. “This is a turning point in history, and the world is dying for leadership.”

Mangino, who believes TheScoop08.com will provide students with a medium to share their political passions, said the site will be open to everyone.

“We’re looking for students everywhere, regardless of where they go to school,” he said. “We’re trying to promote an open forum of ideas for people who are passionate about politics, sociology, journalism and writing.”

Despite Mangino’s optimism, however, some Stanford students have questioned the benefits of such a resource.

Nellie Selander ‘07, former president and current board member of the Stanford Democrats, said she is skeptical of the site’s place in the political arena.

“People who would look for a web site like this are already interested and informed in politics,” she said. “It doesn’t seem to be really filling an empty niche. There are a million blogs out there.”

Others acknowledge the potential value of the site, however.

“The fact that so much information about the election is centralized on one site is convenient,” said Neil Lakin ‘09, who researched political activism on college campuses for his Program in Writing and Rhetoric (PWR) research paper.

Lakin said that Stanford students — who his research showed were generally engaged and interested in politics — may not need the site as much as the average college student.

“Stanford students are more politically aware than they give themselves credit for,” he said. “You always hear students describing themselves as politically apathetic, living in the ‘Stanford Bubble,’ but walking through White Plaza and seeing the variety of flyers put up by student groups, you realize that students here are in fact very passionate about political issues.”

TheScoop08.com will launch on Aug. 8. Students interested in contributing can contact Mangino or Heffner at http://www.thescoop08.com.