There were winners on Election Day other than the Democrats. In the race for best media coverage, the winners were Websites, according to a report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which followed 32 different outlets, including newspaper Websites, television programs, blogs, magazine Websites and aggregators like Google and Yahoo.
The Websites delivered results quickly, allowing users to dig as deeply as they wanted into exit poll information and interactive maps with reports on hundreds of races.
“Most news organizations are still finding their way in this new multimedia environment,” said the report, compiled by Tom Rosenstiel, director of the project, which is affiliated with the Pew Research Center.
The posting of once-privileged exit polls, for which the networks pay, and the linking with state boards of election for county-by-county results are changing the election-night equation between media organizations and consumers, the report said.
“The exit poll may be more important today, not less, since users are probing that information directly, functioning as their own editors going state by state, looking for demographic information, late deciders and more,” the report said.
The report notes websites did well in part because the exit poll data was reliable. If that data were misleading, however, as it has been in recent years, all news organizations would be vulnerable.
Among the better sites, the report said, was MSNBC.com, which was particularly easy to navigate with an array of searchable features including results, videos and discussion boards.
Perhaps faring least well in the Project for Excellence survey were bloggers, who, the report said, were left empty-handed because there were few snafus to discuss and they offered no original reporting.
