Obama Claims Victory
America made history tonight, electing its first African American president.
Where and How to Watch Election Day Results Online
As news organizations, watchdogs and voters prepare for the Super Bowl of politics, it seemed like a good idea to survey what will be online for Nov. 4.
Some sites will start their coverage early. Already, the massive, all-volunteer Twitter Vote Report has been logging and mapping voting problems and good experiences.
Most complaints so far have been about long wait times and registration confusion. To participate, send a tweet with the #votereport hashtag.
New to Twitter? Not on Twitter? There are other ways to send a report. Developer Nathan Freitas has come up with some additional ways to look through the data.
At 6 a.m. ET on Election Day, the Washington Post will begin tracking voter experiences and related national news on their Vote Monitor page. To participate and to send news tips, post a Twitter message to PostVoteMonitor.
In addition, WaPo has interactive maps, live discussions, blogging and articles peppered around its site and on their politics page. Be sure to have a look at the very cool TimeSpace map and timeline mashup.
The New York Times just announced a slew of goodies for election coverage. A very handy tool for those who want to jockey returns is the pop-up dashboard, which will include live election returns beginning at 6 p.m. ET, as well as electoral vote tallies from network news, CNN and the Associated Press.
The Grey Lady is also trying to create the largest online archive of polling place photographs taken by voters. Add your photo to the mix under a Creative Commons license on the Polling Places page.
Addicted to Flickr? Editors at Yahoo News will be culling election-related photos from the site and posting them on yahoo.com and news.yahoo.com. Put the word “election” somewhere in the title, comment or tag to be part of the search.
If you’re going to be out and about, bookmark the Online NewsHour’s mobile site. In addition to updates on the election, there’s a handy list of poll closing times and electoral votes.
NPR political analyst Ken Rudin has predicted Obama will win the race, but as we know, it ain’t over till it’s over. Want to map your own hypothetical outcome? Check out the You Predict map. The NewsHour will begin its TV broadcast at 9 p.m. ET, but you can follow developing coverage online now.
The Star-News may create the longest CoverItLive transcript ever with its Election Day live blog, which begins at 6:30 a.m. ET. The Wilmington, N.C., news organization reports record early voting returns in several counties. Thousands more are expected at the polls tomorrow.
STLToday.com, the website of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, will have their reporters and photographers out in force, documenting any polling problems that may occur. In addition, they’ll be streaming Qik video from separate Democratic and Republican election parties, blogging and posting staff and reader photos. The content will go live Tuesday afternoon. Keep tabs on the coverage at www.stltoday.com/news/politics.
On the West Coast, the popular L.A. Times blogs Top of the Ticket and L.A. Now will be posting updates throughout the day. Around 4 p.m. PT, the homepage will flip from the usual center art surrounded by story links to an electoral map that will track returns for the presidential race as well as 12 hotly contested propositions. Sometime after, the site will launch a separate section on California.
MSNBC will be revamping its homepage for elections coverage. Before then, you can embed a customizable live results widget like the one below on your site.
Photo by Hilary McHone/Flickr
Election Gets Serious, Bored Audiences Want Fun. What to Do? Check This Roundup
There are lots and lots of ways to keep up with tonight’s town hall between John McCain and Barack Obama.
You could watch on TV, of course, but what fun is that? Here are a few suggestions to make your viewing experience more engaging:
- Graphic designer Erica Smith, whose creative and prolific mind has come up with the oft-cited Paper Cuts newspaper layoffs mashup, has just launched Presidential Bingo. Pick your candidate or pundit and mark away.
- CurrentTV is again airing Hack the Debate. Watch on cable or online. If you’re on Twitter, include the hashtag #current somewhere in your message (at the end is good) and it’ll show up on the broadcast.
- Update: NPR has two engagement efforts on Twitter tonight:
- Fact check the debate: Think one of the candidates is wrong? Find a source that proves it and tweet the URL with the #factcheck hashtag. You can monitor fact checking here. Need more detailed instructions? NPR’s got em.
- Rate the Debate: Send a Twitter message with the hashtag #dialtest and monitor one of two ways: verbally and graphically on Plodt.
To participate:
1. Follow Plodt on Twitter.
2. Tweet about the debate, ranking the candidates’ performance on a scale of 1 to 10. For instance:
Let me be clear, I’m ambivalent. *Obama 5.3*If they use the words Main Street one more time, I’m going to slit my wrists. *McCain 1* *Obama 1*
Take that, non-maverick! *McCain 6*
There are further details on these projects if you need them.
- For more fact checking, PolitiFact.com, the Washington Posts’s Fact Checker live blog, which begins at 9 p.m. ET, and the post-debate wrap at FactCheck.org look promising.
Even if you can’t be at Belmont University, you can still be part of the action. Enjoy!
The Joe Biden-Sarah Palin Debate as a Wordle Cloud
Olympics Coverage Online Reaches for the Brass Ring
NBC may have a death grip on the U.S. broadcast of the Summer Olympics, but that hasn’t stopped other outlets from coming up with different ways to cover the Beijing Games online. Here are a few medal-contending approaches you may have missed.
“Soaring Over the Bar” from the New York Times
American gymnast Justin Spring explains the mechanics of some of his tricks (moves) on the high bar in this combo news graphic-video-audio feature. The video’s a little grainy and the difficulty legend in the lower left-hand corner could do a better job (is A the hardest or the easiest?), but we give the news organization props for another great interactive. Go Team NYT.
“Now Diving: Sir Isaac Newton” from The Wall Street Journal
With the Journal’s reputation as the country’s dominant business news outlet and as the home of personal tech guru Walt Mossberg, it’s easy to forget they cover other subjects too.
This sparkling article by Barry Newman explains the evolution of the low-tech DiveCam in the high-tech Water Cube. It also includes an interactive graphic that demonstrates how the DiveCam works. Click to watch the diver plunge into the pool over … and over …. It’s geeky, but so much fun. Go Team WSJ.
“Off the Wall: Foot Massage” from the Associated Press
(Go to the “Interactives” box, scroll down and click the title)
Say what you want about the Associated Press’s business policies, their reporters are still top contenders in solid reporting and creative story ideas. This video by John Marshall is a gem of the latter category.
Marshall has been sampling Beijing’s culture outside the Olympic venues in a video series called “Off The Wall.” In this piece, he took his tired dogs to a local foot massage spa and got an experience much different than he expected. Listen to the nat sound and the narrative. It’ll make you smile. Go Team AP.
Fourth-Place Medal’s Investigative Unit from Yahoo Sports
A team of Yahoos has been writing a rip-roaring Olympics blog and doing what bloggers to best: acting on reader questions. They call the posts “Olympic mysteries.” So far they’ve answered:
- Who was that mas linda Paraguan marching in the opening ceremony?
- Where was swimmer Cullen Jones during the rowdy 4×100 men’s relay celebration that kept Michael Phelps’s gold medal record hopes alive and solidified Jason Lezak’s reputation as the team’s strongest closer?
- Why do divers shower between each dive?
- What’s that black stuff on beach volleyball player Kerri Walsh’s shoulder?
- And from a question asked last night during Michael Phelps’s 200 meter IM race, what’s on the golden Olympian’s iPod playlist?
The off-the-cuff blog has an enthusiastic following, judging by reader comments. Expect live-blogging and reader reaction again tonight as Phelps whips through water in the 100 meter fly, and women take to the track in the 10,000 meter final. Go Team 4PM.
L.A. Times Dog Database Improves On Old Tricks
Using public records data for reporting isn’t new. Neither is using computers to pore through information to find patterns. But as news organizations look for more ways to offer public records to readers, new takes on old standbys keep popping up.
The pet names database, a favorite of newspaper and TV websites, got a fresh twist from the Los Angeles Times this week by offering more than the standard search-and-list of names, breeds and locations. On it, you’ll find collections of interesting dog names as chosen by the staff, a common names tag cloud, maps of the breeds and names by ZIP code, a tie-in with the reader photos page, and space for user comments.
Times database developer Ben Welsh says the project was a way for him to learn how to navigate through Los Angeles’ complex bureaucracy.
Welsh moved to L.A. from Washington, D.C. several months ago. “When I got here, I knew that learning how many cities make up L.A. County and how the different services get managed was going to be something I needed to get skilled at, so I thought: I need kind of a test case,” he says. The dog names database became his experiment.
The first step was to figure out which offices held the records, then to request the information in accordance with the California Public Records Act. To avoid being turned down for privacy concerns, “I made sure in my earliest communications with people, kind of the first round, to say I don’t want the address of the owner, but I do want their ZIP code,” Welsh says.
Data from each agency was merged into a single file, then the development stage began. Welsh built the database on Django, an open-source development tool created at the Lawrence Journal-World and based on the Python programming language.
Though Welsh says he tries not to advocate one framework or language over another, he personally prefers Django for two reasons: he knows Python, and Django instantly produces a form that allows anyone, not just people with programming skills, to enter data.
That said, the pets database is only the second Times project to be developed on Django. Other programmers at the news company have used Ruby on Rails for site sections including the photo-driven Hollywood Backlot and the L.A. listings and review section, The Guide.
“It’s clear that the people who made (Django) worked in a newsroom,” Welsh says. In tight-deadline situations, having many people working on different aspects of a project at the same time is imperative. On the same day the backend database was created, reporters and researchers began entering data.
“And then simultaneously as they’re working on entry, the developer can also be working on building the public-facing site, which is where you want to invest your most resources, because that’s going to decide whether you sink or swim,” Welsh says.
Though Welsh couldn’t estimate how long the project took from the first public information request to official launch, he says he dedicated most of about two or three weeks to development once the database became top priority.
The project came together so quickly, in part, because it had been based on a prior effort, a database of California soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan that was launched Memorial Day weekend.
“We were able to save effort by borrowing a lot of the layout and stuff, but not everything, from the ‘War Dead’ design and they have a lot of similarities if you’ve used the two,” Welsh says. “And that was sort of an investment that paid off the second time around.”
A new feature on the dog names database is the list of similar names that appears on each name page. The list is created using the Soundex function in mySQL.
Soundex is a patented phoentic algorithm that converts words into numeric code that can then be used to search for similar-sounding words.
Welsh says he applied the Soundex function in “what’s called a custom manager in the Django code that I wrote that just has a SQL statement that passes in whatever that current name is in the URL into the database and finds names that have a similar Soundex score.”
Among the list of interesting dog names is “Pick of the Litter (Editor’s Choice).” In it, you’ll find Welsh’s selections for “the weirdest, funniest, best names in Los Angeles.”
They include Otis, and Chandler (together, the name of the L.A. Times founder), Dr. Zaius, and several names that may be familiar to Django fans.
“It was also an opportunity to give a tongue-in-cheek shoutout to the Lawrence, Kansas, guys,” Welsh says.
The interesting dog names categories started as “just fiddling through the data and seeing the fun ones and wanting to share that with other people,” Welsh says.
“I think for us, also, there was a desire to find ways to package the information so that it would be useful or be topical for other bloggers on our site, where if we have a list of the presidential names, maybe Andy Malcolm would like to write about it at ‘Top of the Ticket,’ or if we have a list of superhero names, it might fit on our superhero blog — just kind of thinking what are the things that the paper covers and that people come to us for and can we find names in there that sort of line up with that.”
What began as an exercise in learning the L.A. County records system has become a way for Welsh to connect with readers. And he says reader comments, especially those left on the “California’s War Dead” database have been the most rewarding and touching aspect of his work so far.
“The people, to whatever degree, trust the site, or they think it’s worthy of depositing information like that, which is very sensitive and very personal.
“Just the fact that someone felt comfortable enough to do that makes me feel like we must’ve done something right. I’m not exactly sure what, but something.”
Pet Names Databases Around the Web
“The pet name database is a staple of computer-assisted reporting.”
Derek Willis, Web developer, IRE member
Examples of online pet names databases abound.
Here are a few, listed Woody Allen-style. Feel free to add others in comments.
- Arizona Republic pet names database
- Des Moines Register pet names database
- Kansas City Star cat names database
- The (Tacoma) News-Tribune pet names database and related story
- San Francisco Chronicle pet name popularity search
- St. Louis Post-Dispatch pet database
- Tampa Bay Online pet names database
- WCMH-TV (Columbus, Ohio) pet database
Digging Through the History of the Iraq War
With Iraq at the forefront of political news, lots of people are asking how and when the U.S. can get itself out. Inevitably some people are also asking, “How did we get here?”
The staff of the left-leaning magazine Mother Jones asked the same question several years ago and created an interactive timeline, “Lie by Lie,” in 2006. It is a tremendous feat of research, reporting and design. And instead of letting the project languish after launch, it’s been updated through Feb. 14, 2008.
Timelines have always been useful for presenting a series of events in linear order. With the Web’s added benefit of linking and interaction, timelines can now be a rich storytelling format that include massive amounts of information: data, photos, video, maps and links to other websites.
“Lie by Lie” is an elegant execution, one that gives readers many ways of exploring a deep and difficult subject. Craig Stoltz at Web 2.Oh Really has an interesting analysis of the timeline including this caveat:
It proves you can advance a political agenda with digital journalism just as easily as you can in the analog world. Edit, select, tweak, ignore. . .and you can assemble your own version of history, just as certainly as the wingnuts at The Washington Times or the pinkos at the New York Times.
Other examples of timelines:
- Timelinescience, which shows developments in scientific thought over 1,000 years
- The evolution of the monarchy in England
- Hillary Clinton’s run for the Democratic presidential nomination
- HIV and AIDS milestones
If you want to explore further, Jan Battem of the Netherlands has compiled a timeline index.
Looking for Ideas for Interactive Storytelling?
Drew DeVigal’s Interactive Narratives has relaunched.
The site is a searchable database “designed to capture the best of online visual storytelling around the country and the world.”
Register, and you can submit your own work, as well as vote on and critique others’ multimedia projects.
“Our goal is to highlight rich-media content, engaging storytelling, and eye-popping design in an environment that fosters interaction, discussion, and learning,” writes DeVigal, who is multimedia editor at The New York Times.
As storytelling online evolves from the straight-ahead text+photos/photo gallery+video format, this new site should be an interesting resource to see what other people are doing. Best of all, you don’t have to be a journalist to participate.
Orlando Sentinel Explains Newspaper Redesign
Editors from the Orlando Sentinel answer some of the common questions in a Flash presentation.
The redesign goes live June 22, but as several others have mentioned, beauty alone isn’t enough to retain readers. The real questions: Will the stories speak to the community and address their interests, answer their questions, and provide for their needs?
One editor in the presentation mentions “more incisive writing.” Another talks about tighter stories and mentions referrals to and from the website. If you read the Orlando Sentinel in print, let us know what you think of the changes after the paper hits the stands Sunday.
