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MORE POYNTER ONLINE ELECTION COVERAGE
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Tuesday's mid-term elections presented the nation's newsrooms with all the traditional challenges of complex news unfolding fast on deadline. But this time, more and more journalists and their citizen colleagues took advantage of emerging media tools -- from blogs to vlogs to customized databases -- to get the story told.
We know many of you were fully engaged producing your own coverage, so we pulled together examples of work that's worth a look from all different media, in markets of varying sizes, all across the country. Beyond Election 2006, many of the tools and approaches on display over the past 24 hours hold promise for everyday coverage going forward -- up to and including Nov. 4, 2008.
See examples of election-night innovation in this gallery.
1.) Personalized Results Tracking
CNN's AmericaVotes2006: This is the cleanest page I have ever seen for keeping track of what a network
has projected. CNN makes it easy to keep up with massive numbers of races in one
spot.
CNN also allowed users to enter up to 20 races that they want to automatically
track. The projections are listed in chronological order with the newest ones at
the top. --
Al TompkinsFox News' Track Your Races: Fox News also allows you to build a tracking program to watch just the
races you care about online. The Fox News Web site also was
streaming live video of Fox Radio. Why they were running video of radio and not of TV was beyond me. --
Al Tompkins 2.) Citizen Reporting
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Screengrab from Videothevote.com
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VideotheVote.com:
Just as the group hoped, people all over the country talked with voters
about problems at the precincts -- then they posted those videos on
YouTube. I can imagine that, in 2008, this could be made even cooler if
local media got local folks to submit videos. Voters reported machine
problems, insufficient numbers of machines and lines so long that
people were leaving before they voted. Look at video Number 147, for example,
in which a woman in Colorado said it took three hours to cast her vote.
Number 145 is from Ohio, where
Election Protection
intervened on behalf of a voter who was about to be turned away. It is
quite a story. This kind of "citizen journalism," I think, is really
very useful. --
Al TompkinsThe Washington Post's "Report Your Voting Experience" page: I also like the
Washington Post page allowing people to report any problems they had voting and asking if a reporter could contact the person. --
Al Tompkins
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Screengrab from Columbusdispatch.com
Columbus Dispatch readers share their voting experiences. |
The Columbus Dispatch's Hot Issue:
The Columbus Dispatch
latched onto the "Hot Issue" of the day by asking readers to tell
about their voting experiences online. They got hundreds of comments.
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Al Tompkins
MSNBC's Dashboard: Among everything else about this feature, I love the animations. --
Al TompkinsExit poll summary:
USAToday.com compiled the most useful roundup of what exit polls show: It is simple, easy to read and compares attitudes on issues to the last election. --
Al Tompkins 4.) Blogging the Count
The Blog Party: This element of CNN.com turned bloggers into an adjunct of the CNN reporting team
and made the story on many of their blogs the party itself. --
Jill GeislerCNN's Blog Party: I like the CNN Blog Party. It is a roomful of partying bloggers with an
open bar. They spent the night blogging about politics and blogging
about blogging. Clearly this is something that local newsrooms could do
in 2008, assuming we are still blogging in 2008. The party includes
Wonkette,
MyDD,
Fishbowl DC,
The Huffington Post,
LostRemote,
Instapundit and lots of other big names. --
Al TompkinsLots of News Orgs Have Blog Parties: CNN got a lot of attention for inviting bloggers to a classy Washington bar.
Despite an apparent fear among some mainstream news organizations
to use the word blog, USA Today launched Electionline, a self-proclaimed blog
that closely followed results throughout the night.
More often than not, the posts on the blog reported on what other
news organizations were reporting. It noted the projections being made the major
television networks -- and the projections and results being released by The Associated Press.
It even mixed in some fun. Did I care what the president ate for
dinner? Electionline told me:
As he ponders what the
election results may or may not mean for the last two years of his
administration, the White House says President Bush is dining tonight on corn
bisque, beef loin with squash and spinach gratin, tomato salad, and -- for
dessert -- apple and almond tart with vanilla ice cream.
Joining him on what seems to be a boys'
night in: Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten, political czar Karl Rove,
communications chief Dan Bartlett, former Commerce Secretary Don Evans, RNC
Chairman Ken Mehlman, and businessman/friend Brad Freeman. -- Pat Walters
Time's Election Night blog included entries from Joe Klein and colleagues Ana Marie Cox and James Poniewozik.
Some items: "Does Matt Drudge Know Something We Don't?"
"
The Exit-Poll
Moratorium, Dead at Age 30 Minutes" and "The Great Media
Conspiracy Election Day Lunch."
"The Midterm Blog" provided some insiderish views of reporters
covering the election. What are the challenges they've encountered? What
criticism do they have of industry coverage?
Among Cox's posts: "Of course, I
live in the District, so it's not like it matters. Still, I tend to have a
rather knee-jerk negative reaction to the pious position that journalists are
somehow "above" the voting process. It presumes that readers are too
dumb to understand that someone can have opinions but not express them publicly
and that journalists are so important their votes matter more than others'." -- Candace Clarke
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Screengrab from beloblog.com
Dallas Morning News Election Blog |
Poynter seminar alum Linda Leavell provided this update from The Dallas Morning News: "We have tagged the election experts in the newsroom to
blog the election tonight instead of doing an AP-style writethru approach. We have Carl Leubsdorf in Washington working on the national and congressional developments; Karen Brooks in Austin doing our governor's race and other state contests; and a couple of people in Dallas on the local races." --
Bill Mitchell5.) Equipping the VotersDiscovering Themselves: The
Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch produced a
Senate voting guide, in which users basically
take a quiz on their own views. Then it matches them up with the views of
either Sen. George Allen (R) or Jim Webb Jr. (D), so they see with whom
they stand. --
Leann Frola St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Touch-Screen Voting Guide: The St. Louis area prepared itself to use electronic voting machines for the first time this election. The paper created this interactive graphic to introduce its readers to the new voting process. I got the heads-up on this one from Elie Gardner, a former Poynter summer fellow and online photo editor at the paper.
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Meg Martin
6.) Streaming the VoteThe Jackson (Tenn.) Sun's webcast: My old newsroom,
The Jackson Sun in Jackson, Tenn., is going to put on
a
live webcast of their newsroom during election night. Between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m.
(central time), viewers will hopefully get a chance to see reporters scurry
around or occasionally stick their heads out of their cubicle to shout out poll
numbers in the background. There's going to be some attempt to streamline the
coverage with Editorial Editor Tom Bohs and Associate Professor Steve Beverly
from nearby Union University hosting. From what I understand, this is the first
Gannett paper to try this. --
Andrew TranVlogs:
Some stations and Web sites that are not carrying live coverage are
still posting fresh vlogs with videos constantly coming in from the
field. Here is WSB-TV in Atlana. --
Al Tompkins 7.) Continuous Content
CNN's Lower-Third Election Graphics: My favorite innovation so far: CNN is leaving its lower-third election graphics up through commercial breaks.
Advertising sold locally by the cable company is running full-screen,
but network commercials are squeezed back to make room at the bottom of
the screen for the latest vote totals, updates on the balance of power
in Congress and other up-to-the-minute election information. ExxonMobil, AARP and Lending Tree are sharing space -– their paid commercial space –- with the story of the day.
Maybe
the decision-makers at CNN spent some time watching local television on
snowy mornings last winter. At such times, some stations have begun
scrolling weather-related school closings continuously at the bottom of
the screen, right through commercial breaks.
This makes obvious
sense from the viewers' perspective. When they tune in looking for the
very latest information and find their favorite channel in the middle
of who knows how long a commercial cluster, they aren't likely to wait
patiently for the resumption of reporting. They are far more likely to
grab the remote and look elsewhere for what they need to know now.
From
the perspective of advertisers, continuous content makes even more
sense. The old thinking among TV sales types was that their clients
would never tolerate any intrusion into their paid time. But viewers
are now more willing and able than ever to skip traditional
commercials, and advertisers are more eager than ever to make their
messages impossible to avoid.
Product placement, video news
releases and other forms of marketing messages masquerading as
journalism have justifiably provoked a backlash and undercut the
credibility of news organizations that indulged in such tactics. One
logical alternative to letting commercials creep into content is
putting content into commercial space. It looks like it's working for CNN. --
Scott Libin 8.) The Graphic TrafficMSNBC's Full-Screen Graphics: The full-screen graphics MSNBC used to track changes in the
congressional balance of power were refreshingly unimaginative: simple,
straightforward and understandable at a glance. They relied on the
quaint convention of words aligned with numbers. It wasn't as
self-consciously low-tech as
Tim Russert's now-famous whiteboard, but
it was similarly unpretentious and a lot easier to read.
The
same content on Fox News Channel took the form of seating charts
illustrating the space Republicans, Democrats and Independents would
occupy in each chamber. It looked like the kind of theater map you'd
use to order concert tickets online.
That can be challenging for
those who don't think visually -- or maybe
spatially is the right term --
but it worked better than what CNN did to convey the same information.
That graphic looked for all the world like an old-fashioned typewriter
keyboard with color-coded keys and only three letters: R, D and I.
One
graphic touch on CNN that worked well despite being more style than
substance: A small series of bars -- like the ones measuring signal
strength on cell phones or audio volume on video-player software --
were colored in to indicate the percentage of precincts reporting in
each race. The same value was provided in old-fashioned numerals right
next to the digital-looking bars, but somehow the consumer-electronic touch made the information more engaging.
Over
all, Fox News Channel tended to manage better than its competitors to
keep production values from overshadowing content. With the occasional
exception, such as the balance-of-power graphic noted above, MSNBC's
animations and set design subjected viewers to a merciless sensory
bombardment, sometimes at the expense of clarity. And CNN seemed to be
suffering from a shortage of seating. Its anchors and analysts spent a
great deal of time striding purposefully around the sprawling set, in
front of an electronic wall so crammed with data and images it was
almost impossible to process. The display of technology was impressive,
but the night's news was complicated enough without all the elaborate
choreography. --
Scott LibinCNN's Online Graphics: CNN used graphics well to convey the story. In the network's broadcast, we saw a wall of graphics that told stories from around the country. Online, there were
graphics that charted the overall picture, updated continuously. --
Jill GeislerWSJ Poll Reviews: WSJ.com, the Web site of The Wall Street Journal, focuses on
words, not graphics.
But buried in the site last night, I found a great graphic. Why
wasn't it played more strongly?
Another bonus: Unlike nearly all other content on the site, this
piece was accessible to non-subscribers.
The graphic I'm talking about is in the left sidebar of this page; headlined "Review the Results of the Latest Polls." -- Pat Walters
USA Today's Graphics Interpretation: It's a horse race and they weren't ashamed to tell us it
was.
That's the impression USA Today's front page left me with
last night. More than
any other major national newspaper's Web site, USA Today's relied on a graphic
instead of words. Horizontal bars charted the progress of the Republican and
Democratic parties as each crept hopefully toward dominance.
Story headlines were dwarfed by the illustrated partisan
horse race.
I found it to be a pretty useful approach. -- Pat Walters
9.) Chatting the ProcessLive Chats with The Washington Post: In my opinion, The Washington Post had some of the best
photojournalism online last night.
But an aspect of the newspaper's online coverage that I
found more interesting appeared in text.
Robert Kaiser, an associate editor for The Washington
Post, fielded questions live starting at 8 p.m.
The conversation, while lacking the urgency of a live chat
room, was pretty lively.
Every few minutes, he answered a new question from a
reader. -- Pat Walters
Voter Voices: When it came to documenting the experiences of the people who
voted in the election, audio seemed to work well.
The Washington Post ran "Voter Voices." -- Pat Walters
11.) Mapping It Out
NYT Rocks the Voting Map: Maps are hot stuff on news Web sites these days. Every major
national newspaper had a map of some kind. But the one put together by The New
York Times was the best one I saw.
Without leaving a single dynamic map, I was able to follow
results in races for the U.S. Senate, the U.S. Congress and the states'
governors. As races were won, states -- or districts, in the case of the House -- were highlighted in blue and red. It was easy and fun to track results.
This map is worth checking out for a lot of reasons, but
my favorite feature is its organization. The map of House races was drawn not
drawn by state, but by congressional district. It makes Montana
a tenth of the size of Massachusetts.
The map of the Senate races could be viewed in two ways.
In the first, you could opt to see a traditional map of the country, with
states separated by their geographic borders. In the second, you could choose
to see a strange looking map, with states drawn corresponding not to their
geographic borders, but the size of their populations.
This project no doubt was an immense undertaking. Who
knows how many hours Times staffers logged on this one. But if it gets started
now, what's to stop anyone from building something similar for another news Web site
by 2008? -- Pat Walters
12.
Who Won?
The outcome of the vast majority of races had been determined by the press starts of newspapers and the deadline-every-minute pace of broadcast and online outlets. But the Virginia Senate race between Republican incumbent George Allen and Democratic challenger James Webb presented a special challenge to headline writers all night (and morning).
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Screenbrab from www.wusa.com
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By 6:50 a.m. Wednesday, the online sites of
The Washington Post and the
Washington Times were citing vote totals as of 2 a.m. and 2:30 a.m., respectively. Two of the local TV outlets in the capital, WRC and WUSA, displayed the advantage of time-stamps on breaking news, posting AP stories updated at 6:08 and 6:40 a.m., respectively. But the news in all four stories was the same: too close to call. --
Bill Mitchell
Now it's your turn. What did you see last night or this morning that impressed you one way or another?
Add your favorites to the feedback section of this article here.
