The Ultimate Guide to Live Election Coverage
- 0
- Add a Comment
The interminable U.S. presidential campaign season will come finally come to an end tomorrow night. If you’re looking for a map with updating red and blue states (a tradition that dates back to NBC in the 1976 election, it turns out), we’ve got you covered. If you’re looking for more than that, we’ve got you covered, too.
If you want to get your election news from a linear TV channel, that’s your call. But as Slate editor Joan Walsh told the New York Times, “At a time when almost anyone can check voter turnout in certain neighborhoods in Cuyahoga County, I don’t think everyone is going to sit there and wait to be spoon-fed the election results in the order Brian Williams thinks is appropriate.” So if you’re planning to set up a multiscreen command center, here are some sites to pull up:
Both the presidential candidates, Rock the Vote, ABC News, PressPassTV (professional athletes talk politics…no really), OneNewsNow.com (conservative Christian coverage — embedded above) and Politico (YouTube favorite James Kotecki) will all be streaming on Ustream.TV.
The Associated Press will be issuing its first-ever live webcast, hosted by reporters from its Washington bureau, and including voter interviews.
The New York Times has built an online election dashboard that will incorporate news and state-by-state results as they are called by its staff and other major news organizations. On its home page, the NYT will publish videos every 30 minutes throughout the night from inside the newsroom. The paper is also catering to mobile users, with full results available for phones as well as text message news alerts. For alerts, send the word “NEWSALERTS” to 698698. To customize for a particular zip code, send “ELECTIONS [ZIP CODE]” to 698698. All of the options are summarized in this blog post.
The Washington Post is hosting all its election coverage on an interactive map and timeline. Via socialmedian, users can chat about the election, see an aggregation of news sources with relevant Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube posts, and see hot discussion topics rise to the top.
For live citizen news from around the country, try The UpTake, which will be streaming reports on voter reaction and turnout.
The Personal Democracy Forum’s techPresident is also pulling together a “Twitter Vote Report,” effectively a citizen-created national exit poll that combines “tweets” about users’ voting experiences into a cohesive interface.
C-SPAN will offer live streams of John McCain’s and Barack Obama’s election night events via Mogulus.
ABC News will offer livestreams of its own newscast, the scene at both the McCain and Obama campaigns’ headquarters, and a stream of roving reporters in battleground states. It will also offer a live results map, searchable exit polling data, liveblogging and results via SMS.
CBS News will be offering county-by-county results updated every minute, liveblogging, as well as a simulcast of its TV coverage, starting at 6:30 p.m. EDT. Around 2 a.m. EDT, Katie Couric will host a live webcast on CBSNews.com and CNET.com to address participants’ questions.
Current is offering a user-contributed party. Instead talking heads blabbing away, it will instead a provide a pulsating map set to a live DJ set by Diplo. Contributions will pop up from users on Digg, Twitter and 12seconds.tv.
For an international perspective, Livestation will stream Al Jazeera English, BBC World News, euronews, France 24 and C-SPAN, and will integrate viewer comments with some of those networks.
Stateside, there is Fox News’ Elections page, and its live video page (and embedded above is a tour of the channel’s election studio setup). FNC will offer a special live webcast of strategy discussion all night from New York.
CNN has a comprehensive Election Center. Users can also customize the site around the races they care most about. The site has its own team producing CNN.com Live video throughout the day and night.
Live (and embeddable!) video coverage will be available from MSNBC. Also see their “Decision ‘08 Dashboard” — which consists of maps, fundraising and other data, as well as discussion.
Yahoo News will be simulcasting ABC News Now alongside a Political Dashboard, and Google will offer a results map with feeds from the AP.
If you want to go old-school — or maybe you’re just driving from one place to another — NPR will offer live radio coverage from 7 p.m. ET (and reporters will be tweeting as well).
As for text updates throughout the night, a great place to check will be Mememorandum, which tracks hot political stories and analysis. If you install this cool Greasemonkey script, you can see a red-and-blue overlay on links, indicating stories from conservative and liberal bloggers, respectively. Memeorandum tells us it will be increasing the speed with which items rotate off its site so that the newest news and analysis can dominate as they change throughout election night.
Meanwhile, who won’t be streaming live? Hulu, for one, even though it got in on the live debate action. Also, no Comedy Central Indecision 2008, sadly. Though if you go to Times Square it’s free on the JumboTron.
Nor will MySpace be embedding live coverage, as it had previously indicated it might. But it will be offering a live-updating map, text and video blogging by the MySpace Impact team and celebrities, as well as user-generated video.
Where to Get Live Election Night Coverage Online
The 2008 election and online video have had a lot of special moments together: The CNN-YouTube primary debates. Obama Girl. Will.i.am’s “Yes We Can.” Saturday Night Live’s “Fey-lin” skits. And even though those examples might lean to the left, online video isn’t just a liberal thing. Both the Obama and McCain campaigns have active YouTube accounts, and in September, the McCain account had nearly three times as many average views per video as its rival’s. And no fewer than nine outlets offered live online video of the presidential debates.
But those were simply viral videos and two-hour events coming straight from the official debate stream. For election night, the fun starts early and could continue all night. There will be red and blue states to call, voter fraud to police, polling lines to record, partisan parties to tune into, and pundits, pundits, pundits. For those who want more detail, perspective or partisanship than TV broadcasts offer — or for the election-obsessive looking to build a multi-platform election night command center — we’ve sniffed out a few of the election night options to choose from.
Traditional media
Don’t trust the talking heads to do your election analysis? Try your hand at crunching the numbers. TV networks and newspapers will be offering frequently updated maps and data for your perusal online.
On Election Day, ABC News will offer livestreams of its own newscast, the scene at both the McCain and Obama campaigns’ headquarters, and a stream of roving reporters in battleground states. It will also offer a live results map, searchable exit polling data, liveblogging and results via SMS. CBS News will be offering county-by-county results updated every minute, liveblogging, as well as a simulcast of its TV coverage, starting at 6:30 p.m. EDT. Around 2 a.m. EDT, Katie Couric will host a live webcast on CBSNews.com and CNET.com to address participants’ questions.
There are also also plenty of tools on the cable networks’ sites. MSNBC in particular has a trove of tech tools, including blogger widgets. We really liked its vote tally interface-plus-live stream for the Super Tuesday primary, which displayed tons of information in one place.
The New York Times will also offer online video updates every half hour from 7 p.m. to 12 a.m. EDT with reports from Times political correspondents. These days, the newspaper’s site is a powerhouse of infographics (and we don’t mean static USA Today pie charts), and it will continue to offer up interactive graphs and maps on election night.
Partisan punditry If you’re looking for election-night coverage by and for people like you, there are plenty of sites to turn to. The left-leaning blog Talking Points Memo, for instance, has really thrived this election season, raking in a record 16.3 million YouTube video views in September. For its election night coverage, the site will be livestreaming (most likely using the cell phone-based service Qik) from Obama’s Chicago headquarters, and providing live election results via a map created in partnership with Google. It will also be liveblogging and posting TV news clips that it tapes from network TV. But political parties aren’t the only interest groups. Terra.com, for instance, will offer live video reporting focused on Latinos in both Spanish and English.
Whatever your political flavor, you can track hot stories and analysis in the blogosphere on Mememorandum, the political sister site of TechMeme. If you install the site’s cool Greasemonkey script, you can see a red and blue overlay on links, indicating stories from conservative and liberal bloggers, respectively. Memeorandum tells us it will be increasing the speed with which items rotate off its site so that the newest news and analysis can dominate as they change throughout election night.
Enticing the youth vote
Social networks have a special opportunity to tie this momentous political occasion into normal online activity, especially for young people. MySpace’s plans are still in the works, but it will most likely air a live stream of MSNBC’s coverage on its MySpace Decision08 page. That’ll come alongside a live-updating map, text and video blogging by the MySpace Impact team and celebrities, and user-generated video. MySpace set up its own live stream of the debates and pulled pretty impressive numbers: more than 500,000 live streams and 1.2 million unique visitors.
Facebook doesn’t offer live video, but the site plans to add a prominent prompt, asking users if they’ve voted yet. For those who cop to voting, Ben & Jerry’s will be offering free cones, and Facebook’s news feeds will tell users which of their friends have voted. Facebook says it sent in more than 50,000 voter registration applications from its members, and it has more than half a million people confirming that they will vote. The site is an Obama stronghold, with nearly 2.3 million members registered as his supporters at this writing, compared with slightly more than 600,000 for McCain.
Make your own media
PBS and YouTube are encouraging voters to make videos of their Election Day experiences, and maybe even catch some voter fraud while they’re at it. (Not that anyone’s rooting for that.) However, using cameras at polling places is illegal in some states, so be sure to check the laws where you live.
The Personal Democracy Forum’s techPresident is also pulling together a “Twitter Vote Report,” effectively a citizen-created national exit poll that combines “tweets” about users’ voting experiences into a cohesive interface. Twitter, the microblogging service that’s starting to hit the mainstream, is the new shorthand for citizen journalism, and it’s made its way onto C-SPAN, Current TV and CNN during this election cycle. Current aired some 3,000 tweets per debate, but it hasn’t (yet) announced any plans to display tweets alongside its election night coverage.
As long as you’re watching video coverage, parsing through online maps and graphs and posting reports on your own voting experience, why not turn on the radio too? It’s the original live broadcast. NPR, for one, plans to be on air (and on the web) from 8 p.m to 5 a.m. EDT, with more than 100 journalists reporting on the election.
Loading ...
