Online Reporting of Elections

Einar Thorsen

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138085565
• eBook ISBN: 9781317850007
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Medienwissenschaften

This book contributes to debates concerning online reporting of elections and the challenges facing journalism in the context of democratic change. The speed of technological adaptation by journalists and their audiences means online news is gradually becoming a normalised part of media landscapes across the world. Journalists monitor social media for insight into the political process and as an instant indication of "public sentiment", rather than waiting for press releases and opinion polls. Citizens are actively participating in online political reporting too, through publishing eyewitness accounts, political commentary, crowd-sourcing and fact-checking information (of political manifestos and media reports alike). It is therefore growing increasingly important to understand how political journalism is evolving through new communicative forms and practices, in order to critique its epistemological role and function in democratic societies, and examine how these interventions influence daily online political reporting across different national contexts.

This volume covers comparative, research-based studies across a range of national contexts and electoral systems, including Australia, ten African countries, the European Union, Greece, the Netherlands, India, Iran, Sweden, the UK and the USA.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Journalism Practice.

INTRODUCTION

Online reporting of elections

Einar Thorsen

The British national newspaper award for Political Journalist of the Year was presented in 2011 to Guardian political correspondent, Andrew Sparrow. Not for his contributions to the paper, but for his meticulous live blogging of the 2010 UK General Election on the Guardian website. During an election campaign dominated by the country’s very first series of televised leadership debates, his blog provided an online meta-narrative of the day’s events as they unfolded—combining his own and fellow Guardian correspondents’ analysis and commentary with a curation of news reports, links, blogs and social media. Indeed, one of the examples used in Sparrow’s submission to the Press Awards was his live blogging of the televised debates, further demonstrating the intertextuality of the practice and synergies with other media platforms. With entries sometimes up to 14,000 words long, Sparrow’s election live blog attracted between 100,000 and 150,000 page views on a typical day, with a peak of around 2 million page views on election night (Sparrow, 2010). At most the live blog received some 335,000 unique visitors, around 34,500 more than the Guardian’s daily newspaper circulation at the time. Those visitors also contributed several hundred comments each day, with some readers even providing “useful material” for the blog and responding to questions from the journalists.

Emily Bell, the former director of digital content at Guardian News and Media, recalled that Sparrow had “wanted to move online because he saw that political reporting and the internet were highly compatible but not being used particularly well” (Bell, 2011). In her view, live blogging “created a form of news reporting which had both the depth and context it was hard to cram into one space constrained article”. Commenting on Sparrow’s award, she proclaimed:

This is not just a reward for really sparkling journalism, but the validation of techniques now open to journalists such as live blogging. To be adding context and knowledge to real time events, was the best way to report the election. (Bell, 2011)

Reflecting on the success of his live blog election coverage, Sparrow noted how the instantaneous publishing of reports, online before print, was an integral part of this new practice. It also invited audiences to witness and engage with the process of journalism, which to him enriched the experience of being a journalist. He commented:

During the first leaders’ debate I could spot that Nick Clegg was winning within the first 20 minutes. So could everyone else. But I was in a position to say so immediately. If journalism is the first draft of history, live blogging is the first draft of journalism. It’s not perfect, but it’s deeply rewarding—on any day, I was able to publish almost every snippet that I thought worth sharing, which is not the case for anyone who has to squeeze material into a newspaper—and it beats sitting on a battle bus. (Sparrow, 2010)

With live blogging “the journalist moves from a linear, one-off story to a stream of instant witnessing”, according to Director of POLIS at the London School of Economics, Charlie Beckett, “often combined with background context and analysis as well as public interactivity through comments or email” (Beckett, 2010, p. 3). For him, journalism such as Sparrow’s election live blog “does much more than aggregate content”. Instead, “it is a platform for journalists to add material that otherwise would never be published”, which “captures the excitement of covering an event as a journalist and conveys the atmosphere as well” (Beckett, 2010, p. 4).

Not everyone has been celebratory of this emerging form of online journalism that challenges traditional reportorial norms and narrative structures. Journalist and blogger, John Symes, for example has suggested the Guardian’s live blogging format is akin to “the death of journalism”, since it “is merely just repeating all that’s wrong with 24 hour rolling news” (Symes, 2011). He further argued:

There is no structure and therefore no sense, and the effect is of being in the middle of a room full of loud, shouty and excitable people all yelling at once with all the phones ringing, the fire alarm going off and a drunken old boy slurring in your ear about “what it all means.” It really is a bizarre way to run a media circus. (Symes, 2011)

Symes concluded his blog post in dramatic fashion by dismissing the Guardian’s “radical rewriting of the rules of journalism” as “nonsensical unstructured jumble”. For him, this perceived failure was further legitimation of “the traditional inverted triangle news structure [that] has been tried, tested and still stands”. The Guardian’s lead user experience and information architect, Martin Belam, was “obviously bound to disagree”, but responded that the value of the live blog often depends on the topic. Moreover, he agreed that the “strict reverse chronology of entries whilst a live blog is “active” can lead to the more important chunks of the content getting buried” (Belam, 2011). Whilst musing about different ways to display summaries and sign-posting “conventionally formatted stories” within the live blog, he concluded that the problems are arising in part due to “the way that the journalistic usage of live blogs has evolved well beyond what the CMS [content management system] tools were intended for” (Belam, 2011). Concurring with this view, freelance journalist and former digital research editor at the Guardian, Kevin Anderson, expressed concern “that some of the aggregation that we’re doing is really difficult to navigate unless you’re a news junkie” (Anderson, 2011). The preservation of traditional journalistic methods was essential to him, so “that a stream of news aggregation doesn’t feel like a maddening stream of consciousness”. In other words,

Journalists report and choose what they think are the most important bits of information. That’s one of the services that we provide, and in the deluge of real-time news, that service is actually more important than before. (Anderson, 2011)

In the early years of the Web it would have been inconceivable to break news online before print or broadcast. Yet, as indicated by Sparrow’s live blog, this is increasingly becoming accepted practice for many political journalists in an online, real-time news environment. Today journalists monitor social media for insight into the political process and as an instant indication of “public sentiment”, rather than waiting for press releases and opinion polls. Citizens are actively participating in online political reporting too, through publishing eyewitness accounts, political commentary, crowdsourcing and fact-checking information (of political manifestos and media reports alike). Established professional values like authenticity, autonomy and accountability are facing new challenges, argue Singer and Ashman (2009), and being recast in this rapidly evolving relationship between journalists, politicians and citizens.

News organisations have, of course, traditionally devoted significant attention and resources to election coverage. And for journalists “it’s a genuinely exciting time”, as observed by Jon Snow on his Channel 4 News blog, “a voyage into the unknown whose ending will affect all our lives”. Concluding, “once an election is called, journalists go into overdrive” (Snow, 2010). Thus elections often become focal points for experimenting with different forms and practices that push the boundaries of journalistic conventions, such as Sparrow’s election live blog or former BBC political correspondent, Laura Kuenssberg’s prolific election tweets. Yet the influence of Internet communication on electoral campaigns, and crucially outcomes, have historically been tangential. Indeed, both the 1990s and the early 2000s were plagued by numerous proclamations across the world about what would be “the first internet election” (or more recently “the first social media election”), only to be swiftly followed by a failure to live up to most commentators’ expectations. Even political blogger, Iain Dale, argued in his assessment of the 2010 UK General Election that “far from being an important player, the internet has become all but an irrelevance” (Dale, 2010).

Unfortunately, such dim conclusions have contributed to marginalising some very important moments in online political journalism during the same period. Indeed some of the early news websites have been significant for how online journalism was subsequently inflected and popularised. For instance, the BBC’s Election ’97 website laid the foundation for the launch of BBC News Online later that year, which has since gone on to dominate online election news in the UK (Thorsen, 2010). However, it was first in the early 2000s when the website, OhmyNews, provided an initial “tipping point” for political journalism by influencing the outcome of the 2002 South Korean Presidential Election. Drawing on support from OhmyNews and online activism, a relatively unknown candidate from the Millennium Democratic Party, Roh Moo-hyun, was able to gain prominence and eventually win office. Established only two years prior to the 2002 election, OhmyNews combines a vast network of citizen reporters with staff journalists, working in a collaborative environment that merges amateur and professional content into what has become one of the country’s most influential news organisations (Joyce, 2007, Young, 2009). OhmyNews’ credibility in journalistic terms was further enhanced when the presidentelect awarded his first interview to the website as a show of gratitude for its members’ support. The website’s founder, Oh Yeon-ho, recalled that “In the past, the conservative papers in Korea could—and did—lead public opinion. They had the monopoly.” Yet, “In our battle between the conservative media and the netizens of Korea, the netizens won” (cited in Gluck, 2003). Whilst the apparent success online news had on determining the South Korean election outcome in 2002 remains somewhat unique, the emphasis it placed upon empowering citizens in the democratic process—as activists, journalists and informed voters—is crucial. That is, the election signalled a realignment of media power in South Korea, blurred the boundaries of what constitutes journalism and who could practise it.

Two years later in the 2004 US Presidential Election, in a signal of how established blogging had become in its political news landscape, both the Democrat and Republican parties for the first time accredited bloggers to cover their nomination conventions as journalists (Adamic and Glance, 2005). Bloggers also challenged the national media by breaking news stories first, such as the Swiftvets.com’s anti-Kerry video that only gained national attention after a sustained campaign in the blogosphere. On occasion political bloggers even fact-checked and questioned national media’s reporting of the election. For example, CBS News anchor, Dan Rather, was famously forced to issue an apology over his reporting of memos relating to alleged preferential treatment toward President Bush during the Vietnam War (Adamic and Glance, 2005; see also Allan, 2006). Mainstream news organisations began to follow prominent bloggers and eventually even appropriated this alternative form and practice by hosting their own blogs.

Come the 2005 UK General Election, the British national media followed the US lead in experimenting with emerging forms and practices of online journalism. The BBC developed a series of features aimed at facilitating participation from citizens, anchored in the Corporation’s public service commitment to providing “democratic value” and “civic engagement”. This included the Election Monitor blog, the “Have Your Say” topical discussion forum, and the “UK Voters’ Panel” that consisted of 20 members who had been asked in advance to contribute their views “in text and in video, using 3G mobile phones” throughout the election. Whilst politicians shun the debates and manual publishing of comments restricted effective participation, the experiments nevertheless attracted significant attention and even contributed to the BBC setting up a dedicated “user-generated content hub” later that year (Thorsen, 2010). Justifying the interactive features in terms of public service, the Editor of BBC Interactivity at the time, Vicky Taylor, argued that it is “much better if you’re getting your audience telling you what they think than just the officials or people in power … it’s a form of democracy—more people get their chance to have their say about something” (cited in Thorsen, 2010, pp. 224–5).

Such rethinking of audience participation has also given rise to new hybrid professional–amateur (or “pro-am”) collaborations. Similar to OhmyNews, these projects seek to stimulate citizen participation in politics, by providing people with the tools and platforms to engage in journalistic endeavours. Examples include the 2007 Australian Presidential Election when researchers at Queensland University of Technology joined forces with public service broadcaster SBS, the public opinion site On Line Opinion, and technology company Cisco Systems to develop a hyperlocal journalism site, YouDecide2007. The project encouraged citizen journalists “to interview their local candidates …, conduct vox-pops with local voters, and report on the issues central to their own electorate” (Bruns et al., 2009, p. 201). By actively engaging those citizen reporters in conducting political interviews of candidates and on issues that traditional news organisations might not have had capacity to cover, the website also helped diversify political news discourse during the election. For the 2008 US Presidential Primaries, CNN collaborated with online video-sharing website, YouTube, to produce a different form of hustings programme. Citizens could upload video clips of themselves posing a question, a selection of which was subsequently used to interrogate candidates during live televised debates (see Carlson and Ben-Porath, this issue). Thus breaking traditional conventions by allowing ordinary citizens to lead the public questioning of elite politicians, a practice normally preserved for professional journalists.

In countries with repressive media environments, the Internet is helping to give voice to independent and oppositional forces during elections. In Malaysia, by way of example, journalists are highly restricted by law in what they are able to report and traditional media are forced to follow the Government line. Yet a legal loophole preventing censorship of the Internet allows online journalists, who are also not officially recognised as journalists, a relative degree of freedom. This has fostered a thriving blogosphere and online news websites that helped defeat the ruling coalition in the 2008 Malaysian General Election. Five prominent bloggers were even elected to Parliament, further demonstrating the success of online media during the election. However, Steele (2008) argued it was the website, Malaysiakini, following a more conventional news structure that helped manifest a popular space for democratic civic discourse and freedom of expression. It was “the norms and values of independent journalism rather than the technology of the Internet per se”, Steele maintained, “that make Malaysiakini so threatening to government authorities” (Steele, 2008, p. 94). That is, by drawing on traditional journalistic skills, the website “create an institutional base...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• 1. Introduction: Online reporting of elections
• 2. “The People's Debate”: The CNN/YouTube debates and the demotic voice
• 3. Remediating #Iranelection: Journalistic strategies for positioning citizen-made snapshots and text bites from the 2009 Iranian post-election conflict
• 4. Online Journalism and Election Reporting in India
• 5. A Journey Through 10 Countries: Online election coverage in Africa
• 6. “Second-Order” Elections and Online Journalism: A comparison of the 2009 European Parliament elections’ coverage in Greece, Sweden and the United Kingdom
• 7. (Not) The Twitter Election: The dynamics of the #ausvotes conversation in relation to the Australian media ecology
• 8. Social Media as Beat: Tweets as a news source during the 2010 British and Dutch elections
• Index