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Live election night coverage online (Canadian Election)

Anoth­er Cana­dian elec­tion has come and gone. Pro­grammed main­stream media cov­er­age was again, less than inspir­ing. I found that to truly enjoy this nation­al exer­cise, you have to watch it in the com­pany of friends, as you would a Sat­urday after­noon hockey game. I spent elec­tion night online. Using a vari­ety of free sources, I…

Anoth­er Cana­dian elec­tion has come and gone. Pro­grammed main­stream media cov­er­age was again, less than inspir­ing. I found that to truly enjoy this nation­al exer­cise, you have to watch it in the com­pany of friends, as you would a Sat­urday after­noon hockey game.

I spent elec­tion night online. Using a vari­ety of free sources, I was able to watch the res­ults as they came in. Using Twit­ter, it was pos­sible to know res­ults in east­ern Canada before the black­out lif­ted here in Alberta.

Here are some of the tools I used to mon­it­or the 40th Cana­dian Elec­tion:

  • Twit­ter — ded­ic­ated default com­mu­nic­a­tion chan­nel. CB Radio. Fun. By using Hasht­ags, you can focus your dis­cus­sion to oth­ers who mon­it­or the same Hasht­ag (Chan­nel). The best elec­tion Hasht­ag was #Canada­Votes. Oh, and yes, please do fol­low me on Twit­ter 🙂
  • Tweet­Deck — Twit­ter applic­a­tion that allows you to group, sort, fil­ter, slice and dice your incom­ing Twit­ter flow. In the screen­shot of my elec­tion night desktop, it took up my left-hand 22″ monitor.
  • Google Chrome — hav­ing mul­tiple browser win­dows open at once would prove chal­len­ging to Fire­fox. I have 20+ plu­gins so I run a Fat Fire­fox. Chrome is light­weight and each instance runs inde­pend­ently; if one win­dow crashes, the oth­ers stay run­ning. I had four instances of Google Chrome run­ning in my second mon­it­or (17″) on the right.

Ok, that’s the tools, now what was I doing with them?
I’ve already men­tioned that Tweet­Deck was my main com­mu­nic­a­tions medi­um for the even­ing. The back-and-forth dis­cus­sion amongst people mon­it­or­ing the #Canada­Votes chan­nel was insite­ful and enter­tain­ing. It was great enga­ging with oth­er Cana­dians in a nation­al discussion.

On my oth­er mon­it­or, I had Google Chrome run­ning (in clock­wise order):

  • CBC Web­site — live res­ults map of my rid­ings of interest
  • CBC Web­site — live nation­al res­ults map
  • CBC Web­site — live stream­ing TV cov­er­age (sorry, it does­n’t show)
  • Globe & Mail web­site — Live nation­al res­ults chart broken down by party

At one point, I did have anoth­er two win­dows onscreen con­tain­ing Glob­al and CTV cov­er­age, but frankly, there wasn not enough new or insite­ful com­ment­ary, so I reduced the redund­ancy and dumped them.

Over­all, watch­ing the vari­ous media sources and par­ti­cip­at­ing in the Twit­ter traffic was the best way to engage in, what many believe to be, a some­what mundane nation­al exercise.

Your turn, what did you use to mon­it­or the res­ults? Tra­di­tion­al media? New media? Com­ments are open!

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11 responses to “Live election night coverage online (Canadian Election)”

  1. Mack D. Male Avatar
    Mack D. Male

    Very sim­il­ar to you, except I relied on Twit­ter Search instead of Tweet­Deck. I like hav­ing it all inside the browser.

    No ques­tion, Twit­ter is revo­lu­tion­iz­ing polit­ic­al and news media.

    Mack D. Males last blog post..Canada votes, noth­ing changes

    Reply
  2. Adam Snider Avatar
    Adam Snider

    I used a mix of TV and Inter­net, mostly CBC (web and TV) and Twitter.

    Adam Sniders last blog post..Get Off Your Col­lect­ive Ass and Vote, Canada!

    Reply
  3. Brad Grier Avatar
    Brad Grier

    @Mack D. Male — Thanks for the com­ment (Num­ber 1000 on the blog it seems!)

    Agreed, though I think main­stream media has a way to go to catch up. Orm­is­ton’s cov­er­age of Twit­ter on CBC needed some ser­i­ous work. But giv­en the fre­quency of nation­al elec­tions, they’ve got 18 months to review and improve.

    Reply
  4. bgrier Avatar
    bgrier

    @Adam Snider — Thanks for the com­ment! Yeah, TV usu­ally gets me star­ted, but once they drift off to East­ern Canada’s res­ults, I drill down to the loc­al ones online.

    Reply
  5. Ben Babcock Avatar
    Ben Babcock

    I fol­lowed the elec­tion on Twit­ter as well (and then fol­lowed you!). I agree that it was the best part of the night.

    The way to make elec­tions inter­est­ing is to think of them like any oth­er sport­ing com­pet­i­tion (minus the span­dex; that would be wrong … just wrong). Every­one fights it out for a month, and then we declare a victor.

    The news­casters should report the elec­tion res­ults with energy and enthu­si­asm. Some of them at the CBC were obvi­ously enthu­si­ast­ic about the polit­ics behind the res­ults, but none of them com­mu­nic­ated it the same way they would if review­ing sports scores.

    On Twit­ter, it’s like watch­ing a live hockey or bas­ket­ball game unfold. The seats won by each party are the scores, and you’ve got the fans of each party snip­ing at each oth­er, polit­ic­al junkies mak­ing obser­va­tions of vari­ous witty degrees, and the odd per­son ques­tion­ing why the CBC insisted on that “#orm­is­ton­vote” hasht­ag and then only ref­er­enced Twit­ter three times.…

    I don’t think we’ve quite reached the point where social net­work­ing media like Twit­ter and Face­book are hav­ing a huge impact on elec­tions. We’re get­ting there, as the num­ber of scan­dals over can­did­ates’ pasts and the act­iv­ism on Face­book groups attests. What remains to be done is for the news­casters to truly integ­rate social media into their broad­casts, and not just poke it with a stick like Susan Orm­is­ton did. I com­mend the CBC for try­ing, but there is room for improvement.

    Reply
  6. bgrier Avatar
    bgrier

    @Ben Bab­cock — Agreed re: elec­tion == sport­ing com­pet­i­tion and social media influence.

    Social Media can only grow in use. As more people adopt the chan­nel, it’ll grow. I bet nobody anti­cip­ated Twhirl and Tweet­Deck usage when Twit­ter was first developed.

    I pre­dict there’ll be a tip­ping point in Novem­ber when the US Elec­tion hap­pens. Twit­ter could very eas­ily be bet­ter integ­rated into main­stream media cov­er­age. Con­sider how blog­ging is now part of the story (any story). Give it time and Twit­ter will be there too.

    Thanks again for the great comment!

    Reply
  7. Adam Snider Avatar
    Adam Snider

    CNN actu­ally does a good job on integ­rat­ing Twit­ter, when they decide to do so. I saw a spe­cial on the fin­an­cial crisis a week or two ago where they actu­ally used Twit­ter to field ques­tions from the audi­ence (in addi­tion to the usu­al routes of tele­phone and email), and they should the actu­al Twit­ter stream, instead of the lame Power­Point slides that CBC used on elec­tion night.

    I’d like to see more of that type of Twit­ter use in the main­stream media.

    Reply
  8. Adam Snider Avatar
    Adam Snider

    Erm…by “should the actu­al Twit­ter stream” I, of course, meant “showed the actu­al Twit­ter stream.”

    Adam Sniders last blog post..Get Off Your Col­lect­ive Ass and Vote, Canada!

    Reply
  9. bgrier Avatar
    bgrier

    @Adam Snider — Yeah. Rather than co-opt the media (as Orm­is­ton was doing on CBC) they should rather embrace it. It’s an input source for pro­gram­ming, but they did­n’t really use it oth­er than to say “Hey, look what’s hap­pen­ing over here…now back to OUR coverage.”

    How hard would it have been to Dir­ect Mes­sage some Twit­ter com­menter, get them on the phone and then dis­cuss the issues? That would have been great for Live TV. Heck, even get them using Skype. If Oprah can do it, oth­ers should be able to fig­ure it out 🙂

    Reply
  10. Adam Snider Avatar
    Adam Snider

    CBC actu­ally does use Skype. Lead­ing up to the elec­tion there was a pro­gram on News­world at 6pm each day called “Canada Votes: Your Turn” where they invited people to speak about dif­fer­ent issues each day. In addi­tion to man-on-the-street style clips, they read emails and used Skype to inter­view view­ers at home.

    CBC is actu­ally quite good about adop­tion new com­mu­nic­a­tions meth­ods and the whole “cit­izen journ­al­ism” thing, but for whatever reas­on, they fell short on elec­tion night.

    Adam Sniders last blog post..Get Off Your Col­lect­ive Ass and Vote, Canada!

    Reply
  11. bgrier Avatar
    bgrier

    @Adam Snider — “fell short on elec­tion night.” no kidding!

    Wow, if they had Skype avail­able, and did­n’t use it, talk about a missed opportunity.

    You know, giv­en all that CBC is doing on new media, I won­der if they just ‘for­got’ to include any­thing in the elec­tion plans and cobbled some­thing on at the last minute.

    They do quite well in oth­er areas. I listen to Radio1 every morn­ing on my kit­chen Mac. News Head­lines and The Nation­al are streamed to my media centres, Radio3 is awe­some the new Digit­al Music chan­nels are cool, I’m not sure about Bold yet 🙂 but they can do things well, which is why this cov­er­age was disappointing.

    Reply

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