Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog » us election

So was it the ‘Blogs Wot Won It’ for Barack?

Judith Townend — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 14:01:36 +0000

So it doesn’t need saying that US Election 2008 took place in a very different media climate from the one experienced in 2004: just take a look at CNN à la 2004, and CNN right now.

It’s hard to actually think back and remember that four years ago the focus for many of this year’s online followers was still on the TV screen.

Last night we followed live-streams. We Twittered. We traced maps. We enjoyed striking homepage designs as the results came in.

This was the year for multimedia to really come into its own. The public outside the electoral college had a chance to participate from afar. Many bloggers might not have had a vote, but they could be influential: by spreading round a Sarah Palin debate flow-chart, casting a vote on a remote voting map, or putting a supporting button onto their sites (the online version of the rosette).

MercuryNews.com gave these, as the ninth and tenth reasons for McCain’s defeat:

9. “The Internet. Obama broke an earlier pledge and opted out of public financing, allowing him to raise at least $200 million in September and October, in millions of donations averaging $86. He raised more than twice as much money as McCain, and was able to pay for staff and ads in states and in numbers that McCain could only dream about. His 30-minute infomercial six days before the election drew more than 34 million viewers — more people than watched the finale of ‘American Idol’ last year or the final game of the World Series.”

10. “Better ground game. Obama mobilized young people and used technology, from text messages to internet meet-ups, in ways that built the first truly 21st century campaign. It might have brought guffaws at the GOP Convention, but it turns out that being a ‘community organizer’ is a good skill to have when running a presidential campaign.”

Obama’s campaign page thanks the various efforts of his internet supporters, links to his mobile content, and shows where you can find ‘Obama everywhere’:

And what about the negative effect for McCain? You may have your reservations about this story, but Fox News reported in July how McCain supporters could have been hijacked through spam reports to Google Blogger, prompting a Republican blogger move over to WordPress.

Renee Feltz, over at the Columbia Journalism Review, looks in detail at whether McCain was ‘blogged down in the past’ with ‘top-down internet tactics’, which left him unable to keep up with Obama’s social networking strategy.

This diagram shows the online blog cluster:

(screenshot, courtesy of Morningside Analytics via CJR)

Feltz describes how the map “shows a ‘halo’ of about 500 relatively new blogs in two isolated clusters. One cluster includes several hundred anti-Obama blogs (orange) and the other contains several hundred pro-McCain and pro-Palin blogs (green).”

Their isolation shows that they are not well-connected to political blogs with the longer histories, a point which John Kelly, Morningside’s chief scientist and an affiliate of the Berkman Center, explains on the CJR post.

Please do add your own Obama bloggin’ thoughts here. Was is the blogs, and which ones, which gave Obama strength? And what should we expect on the multimedia horizon for 2012?

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CNN.com sees 400 per cent traffic spike by Tuesday afternoon

Judith Townend — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 10:03:39 +0000

This from Beet.TV, an interview with CNN.com and CNN International. By 3pm US time, the sites had received 88 million page views this afternoon, three to four times more than on an average weekday, executive vice president of CNN News Services Susan Grant told Beet.TV. In this clip:

CNN.com Live (with has four simultaneous live streams), had generated 1.6 million views domestically and internationally – seven times higher than an average full day.
Grant expects today’s (Wednesday’s) traffic to be even higher.
Grant said that election day concerns were centred on the site’s capacity to handle the traffic, but that it was coping fine so far.
Grant also discusses CNN’s mobile offerings and its live video feed available through AT&T and Sprint.

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US elections: the best of the rest on the web

Laura Oliver — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 15:53:50 +0000

For those that have been under a rock/on Mars for the last year, the next President of the United States will be decided tonight, giving news organisations another opportunity to flaunt their interactive, live reporting and user-generated wares as the votes unfold.

We’ve already covered Sky News’ election coverage and BBC News’ live online plans, but here’s our round-up of some of the best projects out there – open up twenty browser tabs, sit back and enjoy:

NYTimes.com: the paper has set up a political ‘word train’ visualising how readers are feeling. It’ll update with new answers every 30 minutes (thanks to @matthewbuckland for the link). Elsewhere the site’s homepage is dominated by election coverage, with plenty of images and video – making use of the new video player – and a pop-up results widget.
Twitter Vote Report: the microblogging tool has been harnessed by a network of volunteers to map voters’ experiences at the polls. Tweets tagged with waiting times (e.g. #wait 120 for a 120 minute delay) are plotted creating a rapidly updating map of problems. Could be a great service for local newspapers in the states to provide:

Current: using Twitter, as it did during the presidential debates, the site and channel will integrate Tweets, Digg headlines and video from 12seconds as part of an election broadcast.
WashingtonPost.com: the paper has gone for an aggregated approach, pulling together all strands of its election day coverage on a map. The TimeSpace: Election graphic shows photos, video, articles, tweets, posts and audio and lets you scroll through the day with a timeline:

Yahoo: created a one-stop shop, US election microsite drawing together all of its features, including forums, Yahoo Answers, AP and Politico stories and aggregated content from external news sites, a Flickr stream of photos and options to set up news alerts on the candidates.
Hubdub: the just-for-fun news prediction site is carrying an election forecast map, which it claims is based on ‘51 underlying prediction markets that respond in real-time to breaking news’. Users can view forecasts state-by-state to help them decided where to place their Hubdub dollars when predicting the outcome of questions such as ‘Who will win the 2008 US Presidential Election?’ and ‘What will be the margin of victory in the state of Ohio?’

That’s not enough, I hear you cry. You want more? Well, over at paidContent:UK, Robert Andrews has wrapped up the online coverage from the UK’s newspapers, while Online Journalism Blog chieftain Paul Bradshaw has an extensive list of online activities.

This is only the tip of the iceberg – any other great coverage, tools or websites that need a mention, let us know below.

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MSNBC on hyperlocal plans for interactive coverage of US election voting results

Judith Townend — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 14:34:17 +0000

Msnbc.com has plans for interactive coverage of voting results on a hyperlocal level, Charlie Tillinghast, president and publisher told Beet TV in this interview.

Visitors to the site’s map will be able to click on states and counties to find results on national and local races.

Msnbc.com will stream live events, on air coverage by the network and NBC affiliates.

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Washingtonpost.com: AP controversial in US election content

Judith Townend — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 12:48:30 +0000

The AP is breaking 'more than news' this election: some of the 'most eyebrow-raising stories' this presidential-election cycle have come from 'the stodgy old AP', Jay Newton-Small reports.