From Mashable.com

In a partial victory for political transparency advocates, major television stations must begin uploading information on the amount spent by candidates and outside groups on political advertisement to a publicly accessible Federal Communications Commission website Thursday.

The new FCC rule will make it easier for journalists and curious citizens to get information about political advertisement buys, which was formerly a long and exhausting process.

For now, only the stations connected to the four major networks — ABC, NBC, Fox and CBS — and in the top 50 television markets will have to post their records online. Other stations won’t have to post their records until 2014. As the transparency advocacy group Sunlight Foundation pointed out in a blog post Thursday morning, many of those stations aren’t likely to broadcast a great deal of political ads because they’re not located the crucial swing states that can determine the outcome of the national election.

The new FCC rule isn’t retroactive, either: stations only have to upload information about political advertisement ads purchased from Thursday and on.

Unfortunately for data hounds, the records will, for now, only be available in .PDF format, which makes it difficult to quickly search for relevant information. That restriction prompted the Sunlight Foundation to to launch Political Ad Sleuth, a crowdsourcing project with the goal of making television ad buy data more searchable.

The need [for the project] is particularly urgent this year because of changes in campaign finance laws that have facilitated millions in political spending by outside groups,” wrote Sunlight Foundation’s Keenan Steiner. “Many of them not required to disclose donors and, in some cases, not required to register with the Federal Election Commission or even, depending on the timing and nature of the spending, to disclose the fact that they are making political expenditures.