In an era of shrinking network news coverage and fragmenting audience, the presidential debates are one of the broadest broadcasts around — aired on networks, cable and public television.
So news Web sites could leave these events to the folks who have brought us every debate since Nixon-Kennedy, with the familiar format of anchors, pundits and the two-candidate main event.
Instead, news sites are using the presidential and vice presidential debates to showcase their own live video streams. And in doing so, they’re broadening the spotlight to include live chats, live video commentary from bloggers and comments from the Twitterverse.
In providing these feeds, the news sites are trying to offer a more complete user experience — rather than simply offer news about the event, show the event itself. And they’re sharing reactions so people can see what others think.
These efforts build on the post-debate analyzers that have cropped up on several major news sites. And they illustrate how news organizations are working to close the gap between event and analysis.
“There’s no more time for reflection,” said Nick Ascheim, vice president for product management for NYTimes.com. “People are looking for our analysis and guidance right away.”
The success of these experiments, some of which are evolving with each event, show just how important video has become for online news:
- Between 20 and 25 percent of visits to the NYTimes.com home page during the debates have resulted in users clicking on a video player embedded on the home page, according to Kristin Mason, a New York Times Co. spokeswoman.
- Two of CNN.com‘s highest live streaming days were the day of the vice presidential debate (Oct. 2, with 1.54 million streams that day) and the first presidential debate (Sept. 26, 1.1 million streams), according to CNN spokeswoman Jennifer Martin.
- From 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. on the night of the vice presidential debate, CNN.com generated about 850,000 live streams.
- Msnbc.com generated 260,000 streams of the entire presidential debate on Oct. 7, according to Gina Stikes, the site’s director of public relations and marketing.
- Ten Current editors have been working furiously to filter and select relevant tweets and display them over the station’s broadcast and Web stream.
“There seems to be a belief that there is hunger for more than just the debate itself,” Ascheim said. “Putting the debate itself against that other kind of live content is closing the circle” with other live content on the site.
NYTimes.com put the player on its home page for the first presidential debate on Sept. 26, partly in an effort to showcase its growing video content — it now does about 25 original videos a week — for its audience.
There’s talk of pushing further. Considering that so many people tune in to post-debate analysis on TV and that traffic to NYTimes.com jumps then as well, “Can we do a similar pundit show?” Ascheim said. (There are no definite plans to do so.)
CNN.com is doing that now, but as candidates are debating. One one of its CNN.com Live streams (it offers up to four at any time) is the video of the debate, and on another two bloggers offer their commentary on the event, Martin said.
Current TV’s approach, on the other hand, is to use what people say on Twitter to show the diversity of the debate audience and shift the focus from a few pundits to the whole community of viewers. They’re taking people’s tweets and broadcasting them along with the debate itself in what they call the “Twitter River.”
The site is aggregating Twitter posts from users who use the “#current” code and those who use certain relevant keywords. Editors then scan for the best and most relevant tweets and display them over the broadcast and the Web stream.
“We saw during the conventions that Twitter went crazy,” said Chloe Sladden, vice president of special programming projects for Current. “It was unbelievable that people were posting this commentary track in real-time. This is happening, and if you’re not seeing this, you’re not seeing the whole story.”
Robin Sloan, new media strategist for Current (and a former Poynter employee) said he was surprised by some of the commentary, which is “very meta, actually — People are talking about how people will perceive what they’re seeing.”
He said he sees this as reporting, different from the typical “man on the street” interview, but just as relevant, to “show you what other people are saying, what other people are thinking and who you’re living with, who your fellow citizens are.”
Sladden said she can see this model being used to change what gets reported and how. Rather than watch TV reporters get blown around, she said, see what people are saying on their Twitter accounts as they evacuate or experience a storm.
Ascheim said he finds the Current model interesting. “But I’m not sure that’s why our readers would be coming to us, for that level of unfiltered immediacy,” he said. “There is a line you have to walk that is serving the hunger for immediate analysis but being careful not to make it so immediate that it doesn’t bring any added value.”
Washingtonpost.com also is pushing for user interaction with its live stream. The video player has a chat window built in so that people can discuss what’s going on, said Chet Rhodes, the site’s assistant managing editor for news video.
“Occasionally you get a comment that is out of what is comfortable, but for the most part, the conversations were really interesting,” he said.
Live video is not new for Washingtonpost.com — the site offers about two streamed events every day — but Rhodes said it’s quickly changing.
For instance, during the roll call of the Democratic National Convention, hosts of Washingtonpost.com talked over the event, not much different than what folks on TV would do.
But people started chatting about how they wanted to hear their own state cast its votes, Rhodes said. The anchors responded by quieting down. And the next day, the video player had two tabs — one with the raw video, another with the hosts.
“This is where its’ so important for media to learn from the audience,” he said.
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