Red Bull, Shift-Blogging and Basement Video Shoots: Politics Sites Prep For Game Day
For political sites, today is Super Bowl Sunday, and theyve been preparing for what they expect will be a busy night.
As discussed before, theyve seen huge upticks in traffic this year because of the intense interest in the presidential race.
The Game Plan
Politico is replacing its standard home page with a scoreboard of state-by-state presidential results, as well as key Senate, House and governor races. Townhall.com, led by a team of six, will be focused on swing-state races and voter-fraud incidents, as will fellow conservative site RedState, which will have bloggers in Colorado, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia.
Instapundit blogger Glenn Reynolds will blog and appear throughout the night on Pajamas Media’s online-video site, PJTV.com. “They’re doing live coverage, and I’ve got an HDTV studio in my basement,” he says. He’s not the only multitasker: Marc Ambinder, an associate editor for the Atlantic and a consultant for CBS, will be reporting, blogging and Twittering.
The Huffington Post will also be stepping up its multimedia efforts, with video, interactive maps, widgets and its OffTheBus citizen journalist army, which will be paying particular attention to anything unusual happening at individual polling sites, says spokesman Mario Ruiz.
Talking Points Memo, in conjunction with Google, is updating an interactive results map while two editors shoot video in Chicago. “What we’re really trying to do is to present full-service news coverage of Election Night and not just commentary and isolated reporting, which is what some people might expect from an outfit that started as a blog,” says TPM editor Josh Marshall.
Keeping Up With the Coverage
The sites will be keeping tabs on mainstream-media coverage but also providing their own. “We’ll have people on the road, people here, people working the phones, Mike Allen, who seems to work everything simultaneously,” says Jim VandeHei, executive editor of Politico.
The Next Right will be calling races by county-by-county returns, not exit polls, an approach that has helped the conservative site beat other media outlets in the past, says founding editor Patrick Ruffini.
Newsmax.com will feature exclusive coverage by pundit Dick Morris and a pipeline to the Republican campaign itself, according to Christopher Ruddy, the site’s president and editor-in-chief. “I have a friend that will be personally be with John McCain on election night at his private suite with top aides in Phoenix. He has promised to email messages to me on the best information they have,” he says via a spokeswoman’s email.
Keeping up with readers will be just as important. Little Green Footballs expects 8,000 or more comments, says blogger Charles Johnson. Politico’s senior political writer Ben Smith will be in Chicago but plans to keep an eye on his inbox. “My favorite thing on Election Day is reader accounts of what they’re seeing on the ground, and I expect to post a lot of those,” he says.
Liberal site Daily Kos expects traffic to surge, says executive editor Susan Gardner, “so we’ll probably need a new post up top every five to seven minutes to satisfy our avid commenters.” She will be blogging while channel-surfing with other editors in Berkeley, Calif. “It’ll be a wild combination of adrenaline, information and a very chatty community. It’s going to be a blast,” she says.
Staying Awake
If there’s a general consensus, it’s that every politics junkie will be pulling an all-nighter. “I expect to be up all night,” says RedState editor-in-chief Erick-Woods Erickson. “As to where, I have no idea. Probably at the Heritage Foundation for most of the night and then maybe the hotel bar.”
“There might be a lot of Red Bull,” says Amanda Carpenter, national political reporter for Townhall.com. TPM’s Mr. Marshall says depending on how things pan out, his staff may blog in shifts. “By, say, 1 or 2 in the morning on Wednesday, we’ll decide which staffers to send to bed.”
LGF’s Mr. Johnson promises to be up until he collapses, “or until a winner is declared, whichever comes first. And I’ll be mainlining Kona coffee to stay sharp.”
Politico’s Mr. VandeHei, on the other hand, calls his team a “unique breed.” “It’s game day,” he says. “There’s enough adrenaline flowing that they probably won’t even need caffeine.”
Readers, which sites will you be refreshing all night?
- Andrew LaVallee
Source: WSJ.com: Business Technology