Cover Story: Give e-Power to the People

By Deborah Potter

After the election one year ago this month, the numbers told the story—not just for the winning and losing candidates but also for the Web. There was new evidence that politics could be a winner for local radio and TV stations online, even in a non-presidential year. At WHOTV.com, for example, the politics page drew more visits on Election Day 2006 and the day after than any single page ever had, surpassing coverage of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. The Des Moines, IA, station’s wireless news service also set a usage record as people checked local election results.

So this year, WHO-TV created a new politics page with its own URL, IowaVotes2008.com, as a “one-stop shopping” site for presidential caucus information. The result? Hundreds of thousands of visitors since the site launched in March, according to director of new media Mandy Zook.

The 2008 campaign is already being covered on more platforms and in more ways than ever. A station that simply shovels its broadcast coverage onto the Web isn’t just behind the curve this year, it’s not even on the road. But planning and managing the different digital options is a challenge.

“How can we reach people who are not politicos to begin with and get them information?” asks Kerry Oslund, vice president of new media at Gannett Broadcasting.

“What length should audio and video stories be for handheld [cell phones or PDAs]?” wonders Kathy Bissen, executive producer of news and public affairs at Wisconsin Public Television.

No one has all the answers yet, but RTNDF convened a group of news managers this summer through a grant from the Carnegie Corporation to find out what approaches stations have been taking to expand and engage their audience. In general, the managers said, newsrooms are enlisting citizens in their political coverage, presenting information in interactive ways and sharing more background information with users. Much of the effort so far has been focused on the presidential race, but the online strategies that stations are developing can be adapted for state and local elections too.

Engage the Community: Blogs, Vlogs, Plogs and Clogs

Hearst-Argyle’s WMUR-TV in Manchester, N.H., has made citizen involvement a centerpiece of its online coverage. “We wanted to give as loud a voice as we could to voters,” says Jacques Natz, director of digital media content for Hearst-Argyle.

WMUR partnered with the social networking site Gather.com to enlist local bloggers to cover the New Hampshire primary debates online. The station also featured “instant response polling” to presidential debates on its website using dial group technology so users could see in real time how other voters were reacting to what they heard. “People would watch the debate on TV but if they were sitting with their laptops, you could watch the response while you were watching the debate,” says Hearst vice president of news Candy Altman.

New Hampshire Public Radio is focusing on the small town of Exeter for its presidential primary coverage. The station has created a “Primary Place” blog and recruited citizens to share their comments when they meet or hear from the candidates. A “vlog squad” of students from a local vocational school shoots video to accompany the blog entries.

Executive editor Jon Greenberg says one lesson he’s learned already is that it takes editorial resources to make participatory journalism work. “We’ve spent hours on the technology, letting people know what we’re doing, and trying to focus the thinking of citizen bloggers so the quality is better,” Greenberg says. Still, he believes there will be a payoff, and not just for NHPR. “There is no question in my mind that this project is going to increase the level of [political] engagement in this community.”

WHO-TV’s political site features a blog by its political reporter with comments welcome, as well as plogs (political blogs by “expert guests”) and clogs (links to candidate blogs). The station also is inviting a small group of undecided voters to grade the candidates’ responses to policy questions, without telling them who said what. The grade sheets, posted online, are sometimes surprising. One undecided Democrat gave Republican Duncan Hunter an A for his position on Iraq.

Politics: Not Just For Junkies Anymore

Creating a separate politics page may work well for some stations, but Gannett’s Oslund worries that only “political junkies” will find it. “If we think part of our First Amendment duty is to engage the disengaged in the political process,” he says, stations would be better off “peppering political coverage throughout a website and in niche websites like those Gannett has for moms.” Oslund believes that makes good business sense, as well, since political marketers want to reach undecided voters who may be less likely to read a page devoted only to politics.

Some stations are encouraging online conversations about politics without wrapping it in their own brand. Politalk.com, where “all politics is vocal,” is a collection of message boards you can sort by topic, by candidate or by state. But you have to look closely to figure out who’s behind it: NBC News. “We want the community to feel they’re driving the site, not NBC,” says José Morales, director of digital news operations for NBC’s station group. “We’re trying to keep the corporate part of it out of the viewers’ perception. It’s all about the viewer’s point of view.”

Stations aren’t just giving citizens a voice online, they’re also sharing information on their websites that in the past they had merely collected for internal use. “The work products that everyone used are now what people want access to,” says Adam Symson, vice president, interactive for Scripp’s Television Station Group. One of the most popular pages on WHO-TV’s political site is simply titled, “Who’s Here,” listing candidates’ schedules compiled by the assignment desk.

Campaign For Interactivity

Helping your audience compare candidates has gone beyond the formal interviews with analysts; voters can use interactive tools to find the answers to the questions they have. Hearst-Argyle developed an online feature from a grid produced by the group’s Washington bureau to help guide its coverage. Users can compare where candidates stand on a long list of issues, and also see where the information came from by checking the footnotes.

Another way of comparing candidates is the vote-by-issue quiz developed by WBUR-FM, the public radio station in Boston. Users choose the issue positions they most agree with, and then learn which candidate most closely mirrors their views. The station is collaborating with PBS’s NewsHour on a national version. NBC’s Politalk.com has a similar “Candi-date” quiz that helps users answer the burning question: “Who do you want to be with for four years?”

Fox stations from Boston to Phoenix have launched “tracker” sites to help voters keep tabs on what individual candidates are doing. Fox Chicago started the trend with ObamaTracker.com, which links to stories from many sources, not just the local station. The Fox station sites also offer a fun political widget developed by Fox Interactive that lets users create an animated bobblehead of their favorite candidate (or maybe least favorite).

NPR and NewsHour are developing a more serious-minded widget—an interactive election map highlighting key races, predictions and analysis. Member stations will be able to post the content on their own sites, instead of just linking to the network version. “It’s a national map that we are trying to make as useful to them as possible,” says NPR election editor Beth Donovan.

When it comes to some kinds of political widgets, there may be no reason for stations to reinvent the wheel. Several already are available free from non-partisan sites for embedding on any Web page. TechPresident.com lets you post a gizmo that tracks candidates’ friends on MySpace.com; MapLight.org has a fundraising chart for the top presidential contenders; and WashingtonPost.com’s issue coverage tracker connects candidates with topics using tag clouds, which put most-often used words in larger fonts. Project Vote Smart is developing a way for stations to post a list of candidates for federal or state offices, with links to background information and records the project has already collected. “We want to make it as easy as possible for people to put our information on their sites,” says IT director Clinton Adams of VoteSmart.org.

Newsrooms seeking ideas for online political coverage may also want to take look at ExpertVoter.org, with its grid of candidate videos organized by name and by issue. Think you don’t have time to develop this kind of content? IT professional Gary Stark put the site together in his spare time. Where does he get the video? From YouTube, of course.

-- Deborah Potter, executive director of NewsLab in Washington, is former executive director of RTNDF.

Originally published in the November 2007 issue of Communicator. All rights reserved.

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