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For followers here who haven’t done the job, just throwing out there some insights about the challenges of election reporting compared to even 20 years ago:
When I did the job, election night reporting was mostly stenography. You camped out at the county clerk’s office, got the latest results, phoned them in to the newsroom. That got fed to the web (imagine how behind newspapers were pre-web!) or to the TV graphics folks.
So you’d be at a government office, then head out to campaign parties for the opponents. You’d interview them pretty much like you’d interview a football coach after a high school game. I would know, since I did both those jobs!
And the quotes were pretty boilerplate.
And the quotes were pretty boilerplate.
Anyhow, the job was the same every cycle. It didn’t require much thought. Just a lot of coffee and stamina.
Around 2008 that began to change.
Around 2008 that began to change.
The web, and more generally, news organizations investing more time and effort into making election data available in real time, changed the nature of everything.
When I was in L.A., we had a dot matrix printer constantly humming election results from the AP wire. Just over and over.
Now that’s all online, instant, and most importantly: PUBLIC.
Now that’s all online, instant, and most importantly: PUBLIC.
The context political reporters work in is way different than 12 years ago. Their audience knows roughly what the reporter knows when the reporter knows it. Sometimes the audience is even ahead of them.
So what the public has is data. What they usually lack is context. Numbers are numbers, but understanding what the results mean (what % reporting means, where they are reporting from, what votes are still out, what KIND of votes are still out) is the unknown from audience POV.
So what the audience needs is analysis.
The problem is this cuts against a couple things. FIrst of all, journalists are trained to think of themselves not as analysts even though that’s kind of what they do. The second: most reporters over a certain age are self-taught on data.
The problem is this cuts against a couple things. FIrst of all, journalists are trained to think of themselves not as analysts even though that’s kind of what they do. The second: most reporters over a certain age are self-taught on data.
I will say I’ve seen much better, more sophisticated data reporting from local and national reporters this time. They’ve clearly leveled up. But this has been a slow change, but data access for the public has far, far outpaced journalistic evolution on this.
I think what is happening on these close states is indicative of part of the struggle.
It’s clear to anyone who knows their stuff that NV and PA have been a matter of time for a couple days. Reporters have sent up signal flares, but they’ve been resistant to saying it.
It’s clear to anyone who knows their stuff that NV and PA have been a matter of time for a couple days. Reporters have sent up signal flares, but they’ve been resistant to saying it.
Meanwhile, the public count here in PA is pretty standard stuff, but the process is pretty unknown to most in the country because they literally are just learning about election management in PA. Because they haven’t had to think about it.
Most of the good work journalists have been doing in PA have been about educating the public on this. That most Dems voted by mail, most GOP voted in person, that Trump running up an election night lead was completely expected and that the comeback was also expected.
Nothing happening in PA has been a surprise. We knew how many mail ballots had been received by election night. The need was to communicate THIS to the public, otherwise when POTUS tweets out craziness like “they found a million votes” there is an opening for a lie to take root.
This remains the challenge for election reporting going forward. I know everyone is fighting about polls and models this week. Probably useful, though I think we are missing part of the story if we don’t also understand that this is partly a problem with how we tell stories.
