Article Three: Election Coverage Analysis

Bill Foster was announced as St. Petersburg’s next mayor at 7:45 on Tuesday evening, with 52% of the vote. But coverage of the days events began hours before hand.
With a less than dismal media out pouring during the mayoral and citywide primaries, local media outlets amped the coverage for the final showdown.
But this time voters did not have to do nearly as much digging if they wanted some background on more than just the mayors.
The St. Petersburg Times’s made an entire website specifically for the occasion-elections.tampabay.com. Specialized graphics featuring Foster and Ford ran across the web-site’s main page.
The election website presented a user-friendly interface, complete with all candidates for city and mayoral races, even those who ran in the primaries but did not win. Also included on the Times web page were what they deemed as the main issues facing candidates.
The candidates stances on those issues were also presented.
Related stories, multimedia photo slide shows and a live twitter box made the page informative and easy to use while keeping up with the current multimedia curve.
The Tampa Tribune included the race as one of its top stories on their website, but their coverage was less extensive. That could be attributed to their massive coverage cutbacks in Pinellas County, but their web presence was available and objective overall.
Creative Loafing made itself a larger player in this election as well, that’s due in part to their ample concentration on new media on their website.
Their coverage style has typically been less objective and more editorialized, however that changed largely with the entrance of former WMNF Assistant News Director Mitch Perry. Perry has a harder news edge which tapers embellishment as opposed to CL’s former political editor Wayne Garcia.
The presence of Twitter in this election was utilized more than previous elections, with the Times, CL, and television stations venture into hash-tags. Hash-tagging uses the # symbol followed immediately by a word or phrase for the topic of the tweet.
For example, Tuesday, the Times used hash-tag #kyc09, standing for “Know Your Candidates 09″, which was the banner used on the election sites page. Tbo.com’s tweets on the election were few.
Early posts online at the Times site had a solid report from the polls by 8:04 a.m. Low turnout due to the weather were discussed on two blogs on the site as well.
Suprisingly equal time was given to the smaller races that were as contentious, if not more so, than the mayoral race. Steve Kornell swept Angela Rouson for the race for the City Council seat in District 5.
That headline read, “Kornell becomes first openly gay official in St. Petersburg. Incumbents sweep,” on the Times BayBuzz blog.
Tbo.com posted the election results almost five minutes after both the Times and Creative Loafing.
Creative Loafing was able to provide speedy posts on the election throughout the evening as well as audio and visual aides.
Television presence, unless viewers received Bay News 9, is limited after the 6 p.m. newscasts.
WMNF’s news provided some coverage during their evening newscast, interviews with polling workers and a live update from the election, however their web presence limited to only three stories from today, and had no twitter presence.
When polls returned the results that Foster was leading, coverage online quickly transitioned attention to Ford, who quickly conceded and presented a speech congratulating Foster’s victory.
Overall, I think this is the first tech savvy local election coverage we have seen yet. During the last election, when most of this technology was still in the works or not yet known, television coverage was more crucial as were endorsements and editorials from newspapers.
However it seems that the discussion shifted when the coverage became more ala carte. Voters had many avenues to seek out coverage on the candidates, and forums to voice their opinions, mainly due to blogs and Twitter.
With the addition of more audience participation, the interaction definitely increased attention towards the information being presented.
When the media outlets provided means for the audience to communicate their views, the election coverage’s direction changed.
The introduction of what the community believes are the issues, were presented by the community in an open forum where the news outlets could read them. From those demands, the coverage was altered because it was molded to fit the wants of the news outlet’s consumer. And the local outlets supported the new approach overall, or least made inroads towards utilizing social media networks .
Although Tuesday’s election may be a rocky first step, it is the first step in the new media model, where news is decided by the people and not the media.

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