Tech Changes Look, Tactics Of Election Night

Digital platforms and traditional broadcast news will be integrated as never before on Election Night next year, according to four news executives involved in the planning of TV election coverage.

In a panel discussion Tuesday in New York at TVNewsCheck’s NewsTECHForum, the four — three who are in the throes of setting plans for the 2016 campaigns and elections and one, Michael Gruzuk of the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. who just went through a dramatic Election Night in Canada in October — all noted the many ways that the use of new technologies are evolving in the election-coverage arena.

“Every election cycle, we keep trying to take advantage of the new technologies,” said Candy Altman, VP of news for the Hearst Television station group.

Certainly, the integration of digital platforms — websites, social media, mobile apps — in station and network coverage of Election Night has been evolving for quite some time. But the panelists all agreed that, as adjuncts to their broadcast coverage, digital platforms will be used next November in more strategic and more precise ways than ever before.

They’re finding that their digital platforms are shaping up as media they can use to report on very local races, while their broadcast coverage deals with statewide and, of course, national results.

“I think that the technology offers so much promise on the local level,” Altman said. “On Election Night, when you’re focusing on the big story, there may be some ballot question that is really interesting to a certain group of people but it’s not necessarily getting all the TV coverage. [Stations will now have] the ability to target that material” to the people who want it, she said.

It’s not only local races and ballot questions that will make use of ancillary digital platforms on Election Night. With so much data available to them, stations and networks are finding uses for much of it on these other platforms. “One of the big shifts that I’ve seen is kind of what I refer to as ‘the Nate Silver effect’ across what everybody does,” said Brian Scanlon, global director of vertical products for The Associated Press, replying to a question from panel moderator Harry Jessell, editor of TVNewsCheck.

Nate Silver is the renowned statistician who first gained fame in the sports world who has emerged as an uncanny prognosticator of election results. The AP provides national and local news organizations with election results and projections of winners down to the state legislature level on election nights.

“I can’t tell you how many phone calls I’m on where people say, ‘We want to be the sexier version of Nate Silver!’ So it’s really about big data becoming small data for a lot of these news organizations, so they really want to look at very detailed pieces of information to tell the story. And if something happens on Election Night, they’re not scrambling to analyze it the next day. They really want to be able to analyze it on the spot, tell the story, here’s what happened,” Scanlon said.

Indeed, the need for instant analysis is in line with the evolution overtaking all news media in which news is reported as close to instantaneously as possible — as soon as it can be published on a news website, whether complete or not.

But the TV execs charged with managing all of this data on Election Night say they’re figuring out how to handle it all. And their digital platforms are a big part of the solution, they say.

“I think that this election will be the first one that we’re really going to use different data points on different platforms,” Altman said. “And we’re really going to be thinking more strategically about what the user of a tablet is going to be looking for on Election Night versus the smart phone. And it’s going to be very different depending on where they are. In fact, they might be sitting there using both and watching television at the same time and I think it’s going to be really incumbent on us to figure out a different experience and not a repurposing, and not just putting the same data on [all of them].”

For his part, the CBC’s Gruzuk showed a brief video compilation of some elements of his network’s coverage of Canada’s national elections on Oct. 19. Among other things, the CBC took advantage of new augmented reality technology to graphically re-create the seats inside Canada’s House of Commons in order to report on which parties won which seats.

“The real balance that we were trying to strike [on Election Night] was how do we tame the beast of the new technology we have available to us?” Gruzuk said. “We worked with some quite dazzling augmented reality graphics with a custom-designed set for one night only.”

To listen to a recording of this panel session, click here.

Read all of our NewsTECHForum 2015 coverage here.