Election Coverage: Media Winners and Losers
Wednesday, November 03, 2010
The elections of course. But also a media race as well. Traditional media trying to stay in the lead versus Internet coverage.
Like the races, there were clear winners and losers.
The Losers
WRNI RADIO
RI's only public radio station didn't do much for the public via it's website. The same stories posted at 7pm were the same at 12:30am and no results could be easily found on the website.
CHANNEL 6
While their webiste looked good with some catchy graphics--it was weak with content. At one point during the evening, there were just 4-election related stories on their website. They were last during the height of media outlets reporting the results for Governor.
PROVIDENCE JOURNAL
When results mattered, when the polls closed, the Pro Jo was behind much of the competition. They were slow to get State Board of Elections results posted and were behind Channel 12 who lead the pack along with golocalprov.com. And oddly enough at one point during the night, they had sports stories featured in their breaking news blog on the top of their homepage. Earlier in the evening at one point, the Pro-Jo news blog had just 3-election stories. The paper does deserve credit for its "mapping" portion of its site. They had a creative color coded map so users could see how their candidate was doing in a certain city or town.
CHANNEL 10
The team you trust--seemed to fumble a bit with it's web coverage and had some major glitches in it's on air broadcast. With the web coverage, they were slower to respond when posting results for the Governor's race compared to Channel 12. Web story count and videos were decent but there could have been more. Technically, some gaffes as well. Shortly after 11pm, the station missed David Cicilline's speech and had a shot of a door as they waited for Linc Chafee to come through. A highlight for Channel 10 was the breaking news on it's website that Congressman Barney Frank had won re-election.
The Winners
CHANNEL 12
Clearly, Channel 12 was first and fastest with web based election numbers. They were beating Channel 10 and the Providence Journal through out the night. Their web content included attention grabbing headlines, plus good story counts and a variety of election stories to choose from. It was clear they had a plan for internet coverage before election day rolled around.
GoLocalProv.com
The web platform had some of the earliest video of the major candidates voting in the early morning hours and had commentary from the candidates through out the day. The site posted 25 video interviews and had crews at all the major races during the night. By 10:30 pm, GoLocal was tied with Channel 12 in terms of posting State Board of Elections results. It utilized social networking as well. As an example, one video GoLocal posted on Facebook was shared 100-times. That means at least 30,000 people saw that article's posting.
So for those media outlets who bumbled their way through internet coverage of the elections, look at it this way.
You have 4-more years to get it right.
Jeff Derderian is a former television news reporter and anchor both in Providence and Boston. He is one of the founders of the Station Education Fund. He can be reached at [email protected]
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