Dropping the election ball

Even though I feel like my local news­pa­per com­pletely dropped the ball when it came to pro­vid­ing timely cov­er­age through­out elec­tion night, I have to give my respect to the staff’s work here in Gallatin County, Montana. I used to be a reporter on their staff, so I know how frus­trat­ing late nights wait­ing for elec­tion returns can be, and the results in Gallatin County were indeed late.

The elec­tions office, per state pol­icy, did not release any results until the polls closed. What that meant was that every­one in line at 8 p.m., when the polls offi­cially closed, was allowed to vote. This wrapped up at about 10:30 p.m. Some of the vot­ers who had changed vot­ing dis­tricts had to be called in to the state capi­tol and checked against records there. In all, the early elec­tion results did not start to trickle out of the office until 12:30 Wednesday morning.

How do I know all this? I know it cour­tesy of the newspaper’s staff, who were crawl­ing all over the cour­t­house pur­su­ing sto­ries all night long. When did I learn all of this? This morn­ing at 8 a.m. when I vis­ited the paper’s Web page. That same Web page, please note, was not updated at all between Tuesday morn­ing and the time I went to bed at 12:30 a.m.

All the long lines at the cour­t­house, the three-hour waits for some peo­ple, the delayed elec­tion returns, the fact that Obama had won the pres­i­den­tial race... all of these things went un-noted on my local newspaper’s Web site until this morning.

Maybe I’m expect­ing too much. This is the fourth largest paper in Montana, but that only means a cir­cu­la­tion of about 18,000. This isn’t exactly the Denver Post or the Spokesman Review, after all. Those larger-market papers likely had larger staffs than the half-dozen or so reporters work­ing at the local paper, and those papers likely had larger Web depart­ments to han­dle things like blogs, tweets and other posts from the front lines.

Still. Shouldn’t the job of the news­pa­per be to get the news to the peo­ple? I know that live cov­er­age and instant news are sup­posed to be the realm of tele­vi­sion and, some­times, radio news. Newspapers are sup­posed to be the more con­sid­ered for­mat, the for­mat with the deep analy­sis and long-view that the instant tele­vi­sion cul­ture just can’t provide.

But the local paper didn’t have any of that this morn­ing. Hell, the local TV news actu­ally brought in local polit­i­cal com­men­ta­tors and polit­i­cal sci­en­tists from Montana State University to com­ment on the elec­tions live last night. The local news­pa­per had the same kind of sto­ries you’d expect from any media out­let. Here’s the news hook. Here’s what a few peo­ple at the scene said about it. Here’s any sta­tis­tics I could per­suade the offi­cials to give me. File it. Print it. Done.

Considering that the local news­pa­per elec­tions cov­er­age wound up no bet­ter than the tele­vi­sion cov­er­age, even on the morn­ing after, why not aban­don that tra­di­tional role of “news­pa­per” and embrace the Web 2.0 style of instant jour­nal­ism? A sim­ple blog, updated every half an hour or so, or when news war­ranted, would have kept vot­ers at home in the loop on what was going on with the lines at the cour­t­house, the vote-counting process, etc. A Twitter feed, though prob­a­bly not the most pop­u­lar thing in Montana, would have been a cool thing too. (As a side note, I found out about most of the “break­ing” elec­tion news last night cour­tesy of the sta­tus updates of my Facebook friends who hap­pen to be lay­out design­ers at the paper, the peo­ple who were wait­ing for text to lay out.) All the reporters in that news­room pack lap­tops. The cour­t­house has wi-fi. Blogs are free, easy, and dummy-proof. How much eas­ier could this have been?

The paper dropped the ball here. It missed an oppor­tu­nity to really show the com­mu­nity the inside of the elec­tions process and turn out the same sto­ries they would have oth­er­wise. The cov­er­age could have been con­sid­er­ably deeper.

The damnable thing is that the pub­lic doesn’t expect any more than the cov­er­age it got. The paper could have shown them some­thing spec­tac­u­lar last night.

Related posts:

1. The per­ils of centralization
2. Election day arrives cold and wet
3. Pew Report: Most Americans wouldn’t care much if their local news­pa­pers disappeared
4. Washington Post Sponsors Local News Site
5. Ethical issue: Local paper edits online-published story with no notice of the edit UPDATED