Nieman Journalism Lab

This Week in Review: Twitter vs. TV on election night, and the significance of Nate Silver

Posted: 09 Nov 2012 07:11 AM PST

Twitter vs. TV on election night: Just like virtually every other point in the campaign that led up to it, this week’s U.S. election brought record levels of engagement on social media — Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere. Twitter celebrated enduring the day without an outage, though Gizmodo’s Jesus Diaz was less than impressed.

The other center of activity on Tuesday night was the television, where CNN dominated the competition in ratings and insight. Fox News provided the most memorable moment when Republican strategist and Fox analyst Karl Rove questioned the network’s call of Ohio for Obama based on his conversation with Romney staff. The episode led to questions about the role at Fox for Rove, who played a significant role in Romney’s campaign.

Observers disagreed about each medium’s usefulness for following big events like the election. At ReadWrite, Dan Frommer argued that Twitter is now the way to follow politics live, though BuzzFeed’s John Herrman said huge events simply overwhelm even the best-curated feeds. Slate’s Farhad Manjoo contrasted the speed and depth of TV with Twitter’s cacophony, observing that “the Web was full of what one usually finds on cable news: pointless bloviating peppered with unsubstantiated rumor.” Time’s James Poniewozik also made the case for TV’s continued political relevance.

Traditional news orgs showed a somewhat uncharacteristic amount of restraint in reporting election results: The TV networks agreed not to report early exit poll data in an attempt to wall themselves off from online web chatter, and The New York Times called the election for Obama nearly an hour after Obama himself did, a decision approved of by public editor Margaret Sullivan. The New York Times also dropped its paywall for the election, along with The Wall Street Journal. And in a pair of posts, Poynter’s Jeff Sonderman highlighted the most interesting innovations in election coverage.

There were a few insightful big-picture retrospectives on the campaign’s media angles, as well. Wired’s Spencer Ackerman called it “the nerdiest election ever,” and The Guardian’s Dan Gillmor said this campaign was marked by big media’s failure to hold the candidates accountable. The New York Times’ David Carr argued that the media certainly tried to call out campaigns on their factual inaccuracies, but the campaigns still managed to skate through with their falsehoods anyway. PolitiFact’s Bill Adair countered that Carr had unrealistic expectations for the fact-checking movement, saying, “Our mission is to inform readers, not change the behavior of politicians.”

Micah Sifry at Tech President wrote a smart analysis of the surprisingly lackluster role social media played in the campaign, though media prof Deen Freelon pulled together some fascinating large-scale data on the activity on Obama and Romney’s Facebook pages, from which The Atlantic’s Rebecca Rosen pulled out some initial nuggets. And here at the Lab, Ken Doctor looked at election results to draw some lessons from the Republican Party’s demographic decline for the future of the newspaper industry.

Is Silver punditry’s death knell?: Over the last week of the campaign, it sometimes seemed like this election was as much about Nate Silver and his statistically based brand of political predictions as it was about the candidates themselves. After weeks of critiques, defenses, and off-the-charts traffic, Silver, who writes The New York Times’ FiveThirtyEight blog, was emphatically vindicated by correctly predicting the outcome of all 50 state votes in the presidential race.

The big question that was on many people’s minds was whether Silver’s breakthrough constituted some sort of death knell for traditional political punditry. Forbes’ John McQuaid stated that political punditry must now be redefined, and former New York Times designer Khoi Vinh and PandoDaily’s Hamish McKenzie saw Silver as a potentially momentous disruptor of punditry whose success could expose its futility. British j-prof Paul Bradshaw called the election a wake-up call for data-illiterate journalists everywhere, and Amy Gahran of the Knight Digital Media Center suggested some ways to get up to speed.

The Guardian’s Emily Bell saw in Silver evidence that journalism developed through trading access with sources is under threat. Paul Krugman of The New York Times further defined the nature of that threat: If statistical methods become the way to analyze elections, journalists’ life work cultivating contacts is the casualty.

Others weren’t so convinced that punditry’s days are numbered. Alex Pareene of Salon said pundits can get away with getting things wrong over and over because there’s still a market for their work, and Gregory Ferenstein of TechCrunch said Silver’s style of analysis still doesn’t fit television well. Taking an example from baseball, former Wall Street Journal writer Jason Fry posited that we could see the two methods working side by side, and The Daily Beast’s Trevor Butterworth suggested that the polls on which Silver relies may someday be made obsolete by more sophisticated methods.

Kelly McBride of Poynter concluded that Silver’s success teaches us that consumers “want political analysis rooted not in political desire, but in knowable facts,” and sociology prof Zeynep Tufekci offered a defense of the type of statistical analysis Silver does.

Silver wasn’t the only data-related triumph in this election — Time’s Michael Scherer told the story of how Obama’s campaign used advanced statistical methods to direct resources. Reuters’ Felix Salmon pinpointed the common thread between the success of the campaign and Silver’s work: Both married statistical analysis with the richness of narrative. “They used their databases to tell stories. Or, more to the point, their databases and models were used so that Americans could tell stories to each other,“ he wrote.

Sandy, images, and Instagram: Before the election and our preoccupation with Nate Silver, we were focused on Sandy and her aftermath in the Northeast. Much of the focus in the retrospectives on Sandy coverage was on the role of images: American Photo talked to Nick Cope about shooting one of the first Sandy photos to go viral, focusing on issues of copyright (some news orgs asked for permission; most bloggers didn’t) and pay (zilch). One of the most iconic images of the storm’s aftermath came from Dutch architecture photographer Iwan Baan, who shot Manhattan’s power outage from the air for New York magazine. New York and Poynter both had the story behind the shot.

On a broader scale, Instagram emerged as the central platform for sharing images from Sandy, as the storm became the most documented event in Instagram’s history. Jeff Bercovici of Forbes reported on how Time magazine made Instagram its primary outlet for visual storm coverage, sending out five photographers to shoot for its Instagram feed. But Sam Biddle of Gizmodo decried the use of Instagram to document disasters because of its automatic faux-artsy filters, concluding, “Reality is enough. Instagramming is a fine but thoughtless hobby.”

Meanwhile, Instagram also took a big step toward looking like its parent company, Facebook, by adding web profiles. All Things Digital’s Mike Isaac gave a good overview of what’s in play here, including putting more into users’ digital identities, integration with Facebook, and advertising opportunities. Matt Buchanan of BuzzFeed argued that what Instagram is losing here is the illusion of privacy and security that users had when it was a mobile-only platform.

MG Siegler of TechCrunch argued that Instagram’s ascendance is an indicator that the power of the visual image has never been greater, and Business Insider’s Alyson Shontell said that makes photojournalists more valuable than ever as well.

The Google News/newspaper war: The New York Times’ David Carr highlighted the building momentum for newspaper publishers in various countries to go after Google for aggregating their stories on Google News without compensation. Many of Brazil’s newspapers have boycotted listing their stories in Google News, and France and Germany have legislation in the works. Emily Chertoff of The Atlantic saw this trend as a real threat not just to Google News, but also to its search as a whole.

Frederic Filloux, a digital exec at the French financial paper Les Echos, went the opposite direction, pointing out how minor newspapers are to Google’s big picture. The harsh reality, he said, is that “in lifting the veil on things that mean much for society, or in propagating new ideas, when it come to data, news media compete in the junior leagues.” Malcolm Coles, digital head of Britain’s Trinity Mirror newspapers, countered that newspapers are better than Filloux gives them credit for in doing effective search engine optimization. Forbes’ Tim Worstall came down on Filloux’s side, questioning the French newspaper industry’s sanity.

Reading roundup: A few other stories and pieces that might have gotten lost in the election-week shuffle:

— In the BBC’s Jimmy Savile sexual abuse scandal, the lawsuits — against Savile’s estate, hospitals, and the BBC — are beginning to pile up. The New York Times produced a strong report on the warning signs ignored by its new CEO, Mark Thompson, in his role as the BBC’s director-general. The Times was praised for its coverage, and its public editor, Margaret Sullivan, was praised by the Guardian’s Michael Wolff in part for her call for the paper to cover the story aggressively.

— Pearson was reported to be exploring a sale of its British financial newspaper the Financial Times, though it denied the report. Reuters’ Felix Salmon analyzed the FT’s situation, concluding that it belongs at a media company, rather than an educational book publisher like Pearson.

— Finally, Editor & Publisher’s Alan Mutter reiterated a often-repeated but still-damning critique of newspapers — that they aren’t using the power of the web to link outside their own borders and bring in a more diverse audience with strong aggregation.

Photo of Nate Silver by JD Lasica used under a Creative Commons license. Instagram photo by aarmita.

Election night traffic, trends and strategies from The New York Times, CNN, BuzzFeed, and more

Posted: 09 Nov 2012 06:30 AM PST

Video, data, and mobile news were the big themes for election night coverage in 2012. Though it’s no longer unusual to see a media outlet blur the lines between TV, online news, and social media conversation, news sites were aggressive in trying to challenge the primacy of broadcast and cable news for results in the presidential race.

Some, like The New York Times, made upgrades to their news apps in hopes of grabbing a larger audience watching results on their smartphones. For HuffPost Live, the emphasis was placed on providing a mix of persistent information mixed with conversation. CNN made changes to its website to offer readers some utility on election day, including a new look for CNN.com and a responsive-design results page. For many more, a combination of interactive graphics and live data resulted in high traffic numbers. As journalists recover from their campaign hangovers, here’s a quick survey of traffic stats, strategies, and trends from election night.

By the numbers

A caveat to keep in mind: News organizations measure, and share, traffic differently for mobile and desktop. The information they provided may not be the best for comparison, but it does offer a sense of what data is important to them.

For the 24-hour period around election day, both the Times and The Wall Street Journal dropped their paywalls, which contributed to both seeing higher number of visitors. Sara Blask, a spokeswoman for Dow Jones, said unique visitors were 50 percent higher than for the 2010 midterm elections, while pageviews increased 20 percent. For video, WSJ Live in particular, Blask said they reached a new single day record with 1 million streams across WSJ.com, apps for platforms like Apple TV and Roku, and on sites like Hulu and YouTube.

At the Times, traffic to NYTimes.com was 75 percent higher than the 2008 election, according to Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokeswoman for the company. It was also a record day in terms of traffic to the Times mobile apps. Rhoades Ha said app sessions were four times greater than the 2010 midterm election.

The Washington Post also saw a surge in mobile traffic. Cory Haik, executive producer for digital news at the Post, told me over email that visits to the paper’s mobile site increased 40 percent over their previous record. Traffic to the Post’s politics iPad app were up 177 percent from its previous best traffic day, she said. Overall, for the regular desktop site, visits were up 62 percent from 2008.

Politico achieved historic traffic numbers, 54 million pageviews, and 9.4 million unique visitors, making election night 2012 the biggest traffic day in the site’s history, said spokeswoman Sara Olson. By comparison, Politico saw 5.5 million pageviews and 977,000 uniques during the 2010 midterms. Politico Live, their live video component, had more than 108,000 streams, Olson said.

At NPR, pageviews to the mobile site were five times larger than normal, said spokeswoman Danielle Deabler. Over email, Deabler told me, “A typical day gets about 100k visits and we had over half a million to the mobile website and the responsive version of the election apps page that replaced our mobile homepage.”

A utility-based approach to news

CNN also broke traffic records on Tuesday night, with more than 203 million pageviews and 23 million uniques. Presidential elections are predictably high traffic days, which makes CNN’s decision to experiment with its homepage more interesting. On Tuesday and Wednesday, CNN went with a stripped down, election-focused homepage and a responsive results page. The latest election stories, liveblogs, data, and video were given prominence over the rest of the news. They’ve since reverted the site back to its pre-election design, but Marisa Gallagher, CNN’s vice president for design, photography, and multimedia, told me it was a valuable experiment.

Gallagher said they wanted the homepage to have an informational utility for readers. Gallagher calls it purpose-based design, a combination of time- or event-critical content, built to work on a variety of platforms. “What we wanted that day, and [Wednesday] as well, was to have that page feel like something that was a dashboard,” she said.

The idea was for the site to have flexibility to swap in different types of content to meet reader expectations at different parts of the day. On an election day, Gallagher said, the audience has competing desires to stay current with the election and find distractions from the election. From a programming perspective, she said, that means giving users news in the morning, video and photo galleries in the afternoon, interactive features in the early evening, and video at night. One constant thing readers want, she said, is data on the the race, which is why they went with an adaptive look for the results page, making it easy to navigate on any device. “You see different media usage changing throughout the day based on where the user is and what kind of information is relevant in those scenarios,” Gallagher said.

Social engagement, BuzzFeed, and HuffPost Live

One of BuzzFeed’s most popular election-related posts is “28 Things That Are Worse Than Talking About Politics on Facebook.” While it may be attracting more attention than their original writing on the new, liberal America, BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith says both are important to the site’s success because they represent what people are talking about. “We want to make ourselves central to the conversation and create the things people want to share,” Smith said.

In some ways, election night was the culmination of Phase One of the newsification of BuzzFeed. It’s been almost a year since Smith joined the site to help build a news operation. As the site has branched out into new editorial verticals, politics was at the center, and on election night it showed: Smith told me BuzzFeed had correspondents at campaigns around the country. Rosie Gray was with the Elizabeth Warren campaign in Massachusetts, Michael Hastings with Obama in Chicago. While BuzzFeed is flexing its reporting muscles with straight political news, Smith said their methods, which stress conversation and engaging with readers on their preferred social platforms, are paying off. On election night, Smith said, people were coming to BuzzFeed for that approach to politics. “We had this front-page audience coming to BuzzFeed around a major news event, which is gratifying and fun,” Smith said. Unique visitors to BuzzFeed were up 20 percent from an average day, according to Smith.

For places like BuzzFeed and HuffPost Live, the recently launched streaming video network from The Huffington Post, the challenge is emulating the style, but not necessarily the substance, of traditional media. For BuzzFeed, that means setting up bureaus and putting reporters on the trail. For HuffPost Live, that means reports from the field, check-ins with bureaus, and empaneling a group of experts.

But the coverage was less frenetic than the cable or TV networks, said Roy Sekoff, who heads HuffPost Live. The emphasis was on delivering up-to-date information and conversation between the hosts and viewers, he said. “We did over 12 hours of live coverage that, I say, truly stood up to what anyone else was doing,” Sekoff said.

Between its main site and embedded video players on other parts of the Huffington Post, HuffPost Live saw more than 1.5 million viewers, with 300,000 uniques to HuffPost Live itself. At its peak, Sekoff said, HuffPost live had 212,000 concurrent streams. On election night, the average length of visit for HuffPost Live was around 12 minutes, Sekoff said.

Sekoff said people came to the site because of its different approach to news, which aims to put hosts, reporters, experts, and the audience all on the same level. “We weren’t trying, as we never have tried, to replicate the TV experience,” he said.

HuffPost Live recently launched its first iPad app, and Sekoff said it was too early to release data from the app. But he expects the audience on mobile to grow. People are already using tablets and smartphones to watch live video, but also repackaged clips from the streaming network, he said. During the second presidential debate, 44,000 people came to HuffPost Live on a mobile device, according to Sekoff. “We’re three months old — 12 weeks. The whole thing is a learning process,” he said. “I approached this with understanding and excitement that this would be an iterative process.”

Nights like election night are important to gaining familiarity for the network, but also getting viewers to establish new habits, Sekoff said. Big news events were part of what drove the growth of the Huffington Post in its early days, and he expects to see a similar trend with HuffPost Live. “It attracts people, gets them to try something new, it gets new visitors to experience it,” he said. “Hopefully, they like it and make it a part of their media diet.”

Image from willivolt used under a Creative Commons License. Ben Smith photo courtesy of Macey J. Foronda for BuzzFeed.

YULI AKHMADA

Sabtu, 10 November 2012