Election hangovers: what went right, what didn’t?
Steve Safran November 8th, 2006
Let LR be your therapist today. Tell us about your experiences covering the election. We saw all sorts of terrific examples of creative uses of online media (Here’s Poynter’s list). Now it’s time to tell us what worked - and what didn’t work so well. You can post anonymously if you like - for the purposes of this, we’re all about the learning.
4 Comments Add your own
1. Thom | November 8th, 2006 at 10:11 am
In general I liked CNN’s on-air and online graphics. But online I really disliked those green tables. Apparently they indicated key races. But is a record-breaking blow out in NY governor a key race?
Anyway, I thought the CNN.com home page was a little busy. The election tables would have been the best but that senseless green background got in the way and cluttered the presenation.
Also, I thought in 2004, they had a “close races” page. I would have like to see that again.
2. David Johnson | November 8th, 2006 at 12:31 pm
AP customwire was way slow last night, and nearly every site i visited off the very top tier was wrapping their headers and footers around it for live results.
It reminded me of when the service bombed during the september 11 terrorist attacks. When big news is breaking and AP doesn’t have the bandwidth, newspaper sites are built to suffer and the network sites win. Sadly, at election time, the loser there is local news.
The heavy graphics and flash should go, AP should provide xml streams to client sites so they can do their own treatments with the raw data and take the loads on their own servers.
3. Jeff Bailey | November 9th, 2006 at 1:23 pm
David;
AP does offer an election FTP feed. We used that on election night. Imported the numbers every few minutes, ran it through our Leader Plus election software, and then spit out html and php for both desktop and cellphone browsers. For the most part the system worked fine.
4. Sam | January 18th, 2008 at 7:56 am
Wow, thanks for the excellent information!
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