By E&P Staff and The Associated Press
NEW YORK Election night 2006 will go into history books as a triumph for Democrats and rebuke to President Bush. It was a watershed evening for the news media, too.
The first smoothly run election night of the Internet era left many news organizations unsure of where they stood and should prompt some rethinking in time for 2008, according to a detailed new report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, to be released Monday.
The journalism think tank monitored several forms of media that night and concluded the best place to follow the story was on Web sites run by television networks -- as opposed to the networks themselves. This included political blogs ranging from DailyKos to Drudge.
Because of the richly detailed Web sites, fed by both results and exit poll data gathered by the networks and The Associated Press, Internet browsers frequently were more up-to-date than the anchors and pundits on the air, said Tom Rosenstiel, the project's director.
The network Web sites did so well this year presumably because they are run by news organizations accustomed to getting information out quickly, the project's report said.
And, said Rosentiel, "It may not be very long before we say, `Maybe I don't even need to have the television on.'"
By contrast, his think tank was less impressed by aggregators such as Google Inc., Time Warner Inc.'s AOL and Yahoo Inc. Except for Yahoo, they lacked the judgment of human editors to avoid conflicting or confusing information getting out.
Newspaper Web sites also appear to be in transition, he said. They have a strong tradition of narrative storytelling that isn't necessarily suited to the pace of election night, he said. (See excerpts from the report on several newspaper sites below.)
CNN held a party election night for some of the Web's most prominent bloggers. Good thing, because mingling and socializing was about all they really had to do. The bloggers serve best as sentinels when things are going wrong, and nothing much went wrong that night, Rosenstiel said.
For the news organizations, though, the best part of this year's election was avoiding the embarrassment of blown calls or faulty exit poll results.
"That's good," Wheatley said, "because it really was a dry run for 2008."
CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC offered wall-to-wall coverage on TV that night. To a large extent, the networks-- particularly CNN -- see elections as an opportunity to show off their biggest names, but the slow pace of results this year frequently left them with little to say or do, Rosenstiel said.
"Showcasing talent may not always be the best way of telling the story," he said.
The cable networks should spend less time on pointless talk and more time with reporters, and could even supplement coverage during quieter times with prepared reports on the personalities and issues, he said.
"If they wanted to tell the story of the election rather than put on a live television show, they could have had a much richer profile," he said.
Wheatley wonders whether all networks might soon entice people by video streaming coverage online, on the same site where viewers would also be able to search for results that interest them.
The section of the PEJ report on newspaper sites is excerpted below. The full report can be found on Monday at www.journalism.org.
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For a generation of election nights, the nation’s newspapers have been relegated to an afterthought. While they might have promised depth and analysis, in reality, it was often less clear what the papers the next day offered that political junkies who had watched well into the night had not already learned.
The Internet offers the potential to turn that upside down. Whatever advantage might be promised in the supposed thoroughness, precision, sophistication and turn-of-phrase
offered by the culture of newspapers and the nature of the edited written word could now be delivered to audiences in real time. Newspapers could compete directly with
television. How did newspaper Web site fare?
After monitoring several sites, one has the sense of a medium in process, still finding itself. Several questions still need to be answered.
It is unclear whether newspapers are comfortable trying to combine giving readers news instantly while providing the depth and nuance for which they are famous. How much
should a newspaper Web site concern itself with breaking news, versus interpreting it, since the two tasks are often at odds when time and resources are limited? One option
would be incorporating real-time news from other sources, such as wire services.
But what is a newspaper site to do if those other sources contradict each other? How much should the secondhand sources be segregated from the newspaper’s original information on the site, or integrated? Do the standards of accuracy that the newspaper promises the next morning hold in the faster environment online? For the biggest sites, such as the Washington Post or The New York Times, how much should they emphasize national versus local if they are directly competing with the broadcast and cable sites that have no hometown?
The answers were not settled in 2006. The questions simply became easier to identify.
To get a sense of this, we monitored four different newspaper Web sites: those of two national papers—the NYTimes.com and the Washingtonpost.com, the largest West Coast paper—the LA times.com, and one that was in the home of a key Senate race—the Virginian Pilot.
*
The report then continues with in-depth looks at how the four sites fared. Its section on The New York Times online, for example, concludes: "Overall, the Times’ Web site offered users a wealth of original content, and some
combination of depth and speed. But in trying to be speedy its potential depth may have been undermined. One senses that trying to walk the line between being an “election night live” site and a newsroom organization that tries to understand and explain, is a divided task that will take some sorting out."
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