Has online journalism become ordinary? Are the approaches starting to standardise? Little has stood out in the online journalism coverage of this election – the innovation of previous years has been replaced by consolidation.

Here are a few observations on how the media approached their online coverage:

Interactive graphics and databases

Just as the swingometer has come to characterise televised election coverage, the election map has become synonymous with online coverage. From the BBC and ITV to the Independent, Times and Guardian, everyone had their red, blue and orange pixels at the ready.

The more adventurous integrated swingometers into their maps, included calculators and search fields. The Telegraph’s was powerful; the Guardian’s integrated well with third-party tools such as The Straight Choice and Democracy Club. Sky went for style, with a handful of visualisations from poll results and timelines to historical results to how the House will fill up. But across the newspapers and broadcasters this was the same as in previous elections, only better and more widespread.

Blogs, liveblogs and microblogs

News websites were riddled with blogs, liveblogs, and more blogs, with CoverItLive used widely. Journalists seem more comfortable with the rough nature of blogging now, which suits the patchiness of election coverage well.

User comments were also much better integrated than in the past, while many included the ability to share on Twitter or Facebook.

Twitter itself was a natural feature in many places, done without fuss. The Sun featured a widget on their homepage; most others promoted specific election and correspondent feeds somewhere. The Mirror’s morning-after angle predictably looked at how the celebrities tweeted the election. And for all the trumpeting that this was turning out to be a TV election rather than a new media election, Twitter and Facebook played important roles as complements to the television coverage, forming part of the reaction measured by ITV; being drawn upon for questions on Channel 4 news; occasionally driving or puncturing the news agenda, as with #nickcleggsfault. It sometimes felt as if the print media were being cut out of the conversation.

Video

We’re now at a stage where experiments have been completed, problems solved, and online video is normal. The BBC live streamed their coverage onto their at-a-glance live coverage; as did ITV. The Mirror embedded video reports on its homepage; The Guardian had its own video but also embedded BBC coverage; The Sun embedded live Sky coverage. And Sky itself had a gallery of video highlights.

What was perhaps most surprising is that the election didn’t have a ‘YouTube moment’ – or perhaps it did, but I missed it.

That’s it?

Media organisations had had years to polish up their skills on all the above, and the result was professional, successful, and useful. Unlike previous elections, there seemed little to get really excited about, however.

One thing that was apparent was how news organisations appeared to be softening in their attitudes to the rest of the web: embedding video from and linking to competitors; pulling feeds from civic websites; working with users.

Some things did catch my eye, though. ITV’s integration of Facebook into its election page looked particularly interesting, allowing users to watch online and chat online, rather than having the TV on. The Times’ last-minute election chartporn showed just how far visualisation could go if pushed. And The Guardian’s #ukvote experiment and how others used its politics API showed where collaboration could be taken.

The most fascinating experiments came from outside of the mainstream media: DemocracyClub and YourNextMP did a fantastic job in mobilising people to identify and interrogate their candidates. Vote for a Change calculated if your vote could contribute to a hung parliament; My Gay Vote showed how parties had voted on LGBT issues; PoliticsPosters gave you a customised window poster based on your postcode; Election Champion crowdsourced where parties were spending money on billboards; and Vote Power Index highlighted the weaknesses of our voting system by telling you how much your vote was actually worth. Hyperlocal blogs came to the fore. And while most people overlooked the council elections, Open Election Data sought to make those more transparent. In fact the biggest missed opportunity was the council elections.

Did anything catch your eye particularly about election coverage online?

Finally, here’s Martin Belam’s excellent timeline of the ‘digital election’:

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Tony Hirst takes a look at how different news websites are using interactivity to present different possibilities in the UK election. This post is cross-posted from the OUseful.Info blog:

So it seems like the General Election has been a Good Thing for the news media’s interactive developer teams… Here’s a quick round up of some of the interactives I’ve found…

First up, the BBC’s interactive election seat calculator:

This lets you set the percentage vote polled by each party and it will try to predict the outcome…

The Guardian swingometer lets you play with swing from any two of the three big parties to the third:

The Daily Telegraph swingometer lets you look at swing between any two parties…

The Economist also lets you explore pairwise swings…

The Times doesn’t really let you do much at all… and I wonder – is Ladbrokes in there as product placement?!

Sky doesn’t go in for modeling or prediction, it’s more of just a constituency browser…

The Sun probably has Tiffany, 23…

From elsewhere, this swingometer from the Charts & numbers – UK Election 2010 blog lets you model swings between the various parties…

As to what swing is? It’s defined in this Parliamentary briefing doc [PDF]

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The Telegraph have finally launched – in beta – the election database I’ve been waiting for since the expenses scandal broke. And it’s rather lovely.

Starting with the obvious part (skip to the next section for the really interesting bit): the database allows you to search by postcode, candidate or constituency, or to navigate by zooming, moving and clicking on a political map of the UK.

Searches take you to a page on an individual candidate or a constituency. For the former you get a biography, details on their profession and education (for instance, private or state, oxbridge, redbrick or neither), as well as email, website and Twitter page. Not only is there a link to their place in the Telegraph’s ‘Expenses Files’ – but also a link to their allowances page on Parliament.uk.

Constituency pages feature a raft of stats, the names of candidates (not many at the moment), and the swing needed to change control.

At the moment both have ‘Related stories’ but these are only related in the loosest sense for the moment. And there is a link to the election map and swingometer that The Telegraph built previously.

Advanced search

All of which is nice but not earth-shattering. Where the database really comes into its own is with the Advanced Search feature.

This is so powerful that the main issue may turn out to be usability. I’m not sure myself of everything it can do at the moment but apart from the fundamentals of actually finding a candidate, this allows you to filter all the candidates in the database based on everything from what type of education they had, to their age, gender, profession, county and role (i.e. contesting, defending, standing for the first time or again). The Swingometer filter also appears to let you filter based on who wins as a result of predicted swings (not just Lab-Con but Con-Lib and Lab-Lib)

The site is still rough around the edges – it appears that the Shadow Secretary of State for Justice Dominic Grieve went to “Lyc‚àö¬©e Fran‚àö√üais Charles de Gaulle” and ’Oxbridge University’, while the link to his website is missing a ‘http://’ and so doesn’t work.

Data geeks will be disappointed that the data doesn’t appear to be mashable, and there obviously isn’t an API. The Telegraph’s Marcus Warren tells me that they are looking at mashups for after the election, but for the moment are focusing on researching candidates.

That seems a sensible move. The MPs’ expenses scandal may turn out not just to be the biggest story of the last decade, but the foundation of a political database to rival any other news organisation. The Telegraph have a real strength here and it’s good to see them building on it.

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It began with some confusion, but an interested crowd filled the Telegraph’s presentation room for a pre-launch spiel on its new election application, Debate2010, last night.

Headed up by communities editor Kate Day, and in commercial partnership with Salesforce, the media group is touting the application as the first of its kind.

Telegraph deputy editor Ben Brogan said the application is an original idea with great potential.

“It will allow people to comment on issues of importance to the country in real time,” he said.

“You could call it an attempt to represent what those issues of importance are; you could call it crowd sourcing policies… or you could call it a real-time opinion poll.”

The application will allow live comments and debates on topics set editorially, but users can also suggest their own topics. The ‘hotness’ of converstaions will be monitored and will likely influence the Telegraph’s election coverage.

Debates are currently set to be open for three days, but can be changed based on user demand.

Scepticism

The crowd wasn’t unanimous in support, however, and there was some discernable scepticism about its chances of success, and of its usability.

Joanne Jacobs suggested the site should allow the absorption of tweets and let users follow individual comments rather than the whole live debate.

There were also concerns raised about moderation and possible domination by particular people and interests.

The site will be post moderated in much the same way as all Telegraph.co.uk content is, with no tolerance for illegal or offensive comments. However, Day said the aim is to allow as many people to express their views as possible. Brogan added:

“This forum will not reward verbiage, it will reward original and interesting ideas.”

When asked about its user capacity, he quipped it was developed with the entire UK online population in mind.

Citizen’s briefing book

Brogan and Day said the aim is not to generate new audiences or media content for the group, but admitted it would be a nice benefit.

Both said it is an experiment, and the outcomes – including its public and political influence – are unknown.

The tool is aimed at voters rather than politicians, and though cagey about whether they had been approached by political parties for a platform on the site, all were adamant it would not become a “politicians’ soapbox.”

Results of the rolling debates will be pooled, aggregated and published, to be handed to the future government as a “citizen’s briefing book”.

Email debate2010@telegraph.co.uk or kate.day@telegraph.co.uk for comments or suggestions. They are open to changing the site to suit users.

Follow on twitter @debate2010

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She was trying to make sure media (literally) used the “right” image of Barack Obama during the campaign. Jodi Williams was one of the many young brains behind Barack Obama’s media campaign.

I met her at the Digital News Affairs conference in Brussels to talk about the digital changes in campaigning and dealing with the media. She had no doubt that all the new digital tools made it easier for political candidates to communicate independently from mainstream media, on their own platforms.

- Absolutly. Even though mainstream media always will be important, the digital tools have given politicans fantastic opportunities to communicate directly with people. It will give a huge boom to any campaign. If Obama wants, he can address the nation every night as long as people are interested, says Williams.

One of the important differences is how easy and cost-efficient it has become to distribute campaign materials, unlike in the past, when candidates had spend fortunes on tv commercials, to use for example direct mail or hope the New York Times used a picture that made the him or her look pretty.The Obama campaign’s Flickr images from election night have already become legendary.

- When you see these images, you understand much more, you see that even a presidental candidate has to tie his shoe laces. That makes the candidate seem much more human, says Williams.

-In the past, candidates have been able to talk to people through the radio. Now, Obama was able to talk through images.

She is now working in the private sector for a company called Premier Digital Services, but before joining Obama’s team in 2007, she was also part of John Kerry and Howard Dean’s teams.

- I was present when Howard Dean did the famous “Dean Scream”. It wasn’t nearly as damaging in person as on tv. When I came back to my hotel room that night and saw this horrible soundbite on tv, I got surprised. There was so much energy in that room, so Dean’s outburst wasn’t that out of place. But the soundbite brought it out of proportions, says Williams.

She also mentions how the spread of George Allen’s 2006 racial slur on YouTube eventually took down his campaign. The digital tools are powerful, and can easily build up or break down a candidate.

As we’ve already read about, lots of bloggers followed the 2008 presidental campaign, and after Obama entered the White Office, a Huffington Post reporter made history when he became the first member of an Internet-based news organization to be called upon during an official White House press conference.

- Some bloggers, like Ben Smith from Politico, followed us almost full-time. And on all the stops we did, there were lots of bloggers who approached us. We had some safety concerns, because how can you decide who are credible or not? We only had one incident when we had to remove one blogger. But generally, they were asking really interesting questions, says Williams, and adds that a mainstream media reporter such as Brian Williams from NBC understood that he became less relevant in competition with all the bloggers.

During the DNA conference Williams got asked about mistakes done during the Obama campaign, which has been called “the perfect campaign” by many.

“The roll-out of the vice president announcement via SMS could have gone much smoother” is all she will say about that.

-Internet gave Barack Obama a fantastic opportunity to communicate directly to people.But the next five-ten years will be bumpy, and it will take time before we reach true participatory democracy, says Williams.

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Elections bring out the best in online journalism. News organisations have plenty of time to plan, there’s a global audience up for grabs, and the material lends itself to interactive treatment (voter opinions; candidates’ stances on various issues; statistics and databases; constant updates; personalisation).

Not only that, but the electorate is using the internet for election news more than any other medium apart from television (and here are some reasons why).

PaidContent has a good roundup of various UK editors’ views, and decides blogs, Twitter and data are the themes (more specifically, liveblogging and mapping).

Choice picks include the Telegraph teaming up with the New York Times and RealClearPolitics.com; the Independent teaming up with LiveJournal.; and MSN teaming up with Populus for a “wisdom-of-crowds” predictor. Sky’s interactive map is quite fun too.

Innovation in Newspapers has been running an ‘Election Journalism Caviar’ series, mainly focusing on the journalism itself, but interactive highlights include the New York Times’ Electopedia of candidates’ views and PolitiFact’s ‘Attack File’ scoring the attacks made on candidates.

Chrys Wu has an overview of where to follow the results live online:

“Editors at Yahoo News will be culling election-related photos from [Flickr] 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.”

And Reuters has a piece on the use of user generated content:

“The New York Times is asking its Web site visitors to take pictures of their polling places and upload them … Nonprofit group Video the Vote plans to post up to 1,000 video reports, focusing on any problems at the polls … [and] Current TV … through a partnership with social networking sites Digg and Twitter will rely on Internet users to provide its news content. The channel’s TV screen will be a crowded and sometimes disconnected “dashboard” of text and video created or chosen by Internet users.”

Distributed journalism, personalisation, and maps

Current.tv, in fact, is “throwing a social media election party” across a number of platforms – the best example of distributed journalism I’ve so far seen – and also the most fun-sounding.

MSNBC’s results widget is another, more obvious, example.

Yahoo has its own flashy election page, with some interesting indicators, including ‘most blogged about’, and how many people are searching for each candidate. If you’ve read Click, you’ll know how important search patterns are. You can also ‘Create your own scenario’ – personalising the map which you can then email, compare or link to from your blog. (hat tip to Matthew Solle)

CNN also does personalisation with CNN YourRaces: a customisable tracking tool that allows you to follow selected races in real time. The service is also available via CNN’s mobile interface.

And I’ve already written about Google’s creep into content creation with its InQuotes project comparing candidates’ quotes on selected issues.

YouTube is doing Video Your Vote, with a map for navigation and colour coding including ‘Voter intimidation’ and ‘Registration problems’.

And two university students started Map the Candidates, which uses a Google Map to present information about candidates’ visits around the US, and is now hosted at Slate.

Map junkies can get more at 270towin.com (h/t Matthew Solle again) and data junkies can get a stronger fix at Perspctv (thanks EricScherer and Joeri Rodenburg).

Text junkies can get SMS updates from the BBC and the New York Times.

Twitter followers Matthew Bennett, John383 and 10000words also mentioned the Huffington Post, FiveThirtyEight.com, and The New York Times’ ‘Choosing a President’ video.

I’ve said elsewhere that 2004 was the blogged election, 2006 the YouTube election, and this year’s Super Tuesday was the mashup election, so what does that make the 2008 election?

The Twitter Election, if replies on Twitter are anything to go by. Building on its success during Super Tuesday, it has a dedicated Election 2008 site (if only it did the same for similar events outside the US), and has partnered with the likes of Current.tv and techPresident for their coverage, while dozens of organisations are using Twitter for their updates, including the Washington Post and TwitterVoteReport. Also watch out for lost of organisations using liveblogging tool CoverItLive, and a few, including St. Louis Post-Dispatch, using live mobile video streaming tools Qik and Bambuser.

Those are just some of the highlights I can find – I’m sure you have more (particularly from non-English language sources). What’s impressed you in the online coverage? What’s disappointed? 

UPDATE: Gabriela Zago adds: g1 (news portal from Globo) has several interesting infographs explaining the US elections, but they don’t seem to have done one especially for today. O Globo (from the same news organization) has 3 maps (they’re in the bottom of the screen). One of them has quotes from Brazilian people living in the US on what they think about the elections.

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