Super Tuesday Tips

Set piece journalism — coverage of big scheduled events with elaborate staging but unpredictable outcomes — generates some of the best and worst work in the field. You’re on your own for Sunday’s Super Bowl, and we’re sure you’ve already doped out display and coverage plans for a staggering Giants upset or a less surprising Patriots sweep.

There’s a bit more time to scope your plans for Tuesday’s voting, and Poynter’s Butch Ward, Jill Geisler and Ellyn Angelotti have assembled some discussion starters for you below. Whether you’re working primarily in print, broadcast or online, we hope you’ll add plenty of your own in feedback.

From Butch Ward:
Don’t Just Tell What Happened — Tell Why It Happened

With Super Tuesday just a few days away, here are three points for any newsroom to keep in mind.

1. You MUST cover this story.

Whether you’re a big metro newsroom or a small local-local, whether your audience is voting on Tuesday or not, this is the biggest story in America right now — and you have a unique opportunity to cover it for your audience. Don’t fall into the “it’s a national story” trap and leave it to the wire services to provide all of your coverage.

The wires don’t know your audience like you do.

2. Go beyond telling your audience what happened. Tell them why it happened.

Everyone will know, quickly, who won and who lost. Yes, you need to include results, and the more sophisticated your presentation, all the better.

But your chance to shine on election night and the next day depends on whether you can tell your audience what the results mean and — this is crucial — what it means to them.

3. Talk to real voters.

Yes, talk to the pros — elected officials, campaign organizers, consultants, the political science experts at a local university.

Voters, though, can tell you what you need to know most — why they voted (or are planning to vote) for a particular candidate. Or why they’re undecided. Or what issues matter most to them — and will continue to matter to them during the general election campaign.

Pros don’t decide elections. Voters do. Complete coverage demands that you talk with them, too — and give them time to express complete thoughts, not just sound bites.

With these three points in mind, here’s one approach for your Super Tuesday coverage:

Assemble a list of the issues that matter most to your audience. You already know some of them. What issues are dominating your coverage and, more importantly, generating the most public response?

Your local schools? The mortgage crisis? Layoffs? Has your town sent large numbers of soldiers to Iraq?

Now go out and talk with people and ask them a few questions. Ask them what problem they want their next president to tackle first. Probe a bit. If the issues you’re hearing are already on your list, great. But be prepared to be surprised. Sometimes the issues that people care about most have escaped the pros’ attention.

(One suggestion: Don’t do these interviews next to the Wireless kiosk at the mall. The shoppers you interrupt probably haven’t been thinking hard about these issues and you’ll get thin, spontaneous answers. You want thoughtful ones. Since you’re pressed for time, put a question on your Web site or newscast or editorial page this weekend, and ask people who respond for a number where you can follow up with questions. If you find a place where a gathering of people are likely to provide thoughtful answers (some Super Bowl parties might work if you get there early enough), take your video camera and record them. You’ll have a ready-made Web presentation.)

Remember, you’re not “polling” people. You’re looking for clues about what matters most to your audience, so that when you get vote results, you have a starting point for explaining them.

With this “issue list,” you can prepare several stories:

• A talker on what matters most to people in your area on this big day, whether Tuesday is a voting day in your market or not.

• A story that helps explain why a particular candidate appeals to voters who care about particular issues. For example, why does John McCain, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee or Ron Paul get the support of a person who cares about creating jobs? Why does Hillary Rodham Clinton or Barack Obama appeal more to someone who wants the U.S. to leave Iraq while helping to establish a stable government?

• A thoughtful look at why so many voters are undecided. Ask people what they need to hear from a candidate in order to support her or him. Explore what it is that makes each of the candidates, in some way, unappealing to so many voters.

• Finally, use your list of local issues to follow up Tuesday’s results with a story that looks ahead: Given who is leading at that point, assess the chances that your audience’s issues will be addressed.

Remember: No one knows your local audience as well as you do. That’s why you can explain the results of Super Tuesday in a way that will matter, personally, to the people you want to depend on you every day.

To help you decide on an approach to this story, here are links to three reports on undecided voters, from The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and Frontline.

Elections separate the anchors who lead from the anchors who simply read. On election night, there’s always a plan — which always changes.

And there’s never a script.

I’ve written it before: Skills without script are what distinguish top anchors from all others. When they’re putting those skills to work, they make it look so easy that viewers might take them for granted. But behind the scenes at stations, colleagues bless the best anchors for their knowledge and flexibility.

What should you expect from your local anchor during election coverage? Here’s a short list:

• Extensive knowledge of candidates and issues: Scott Light, morning anchor at KPNX-TV in Arizona, says it boils down to the preparation anchors do “on the 364 days around election night” — reading local and national papers, news magazines, political blogs, making local connections — and amassing their own files. Light says he keeps everything from magazine clippings to letters to the editor in a drawer, and he studies those files. Note that he didn’t say he expects someone else to prepare a briefing book for him, though some stations might provide primers for staff. Simply put — top anchors are students of the news and hold themselves accountable for their learning.

• Ability to put events into context: Today’s news is part of a continuum of information — and good anchors know how to tell the stories behind the story. They understand historical precedent and political dynamics in their communities. When Paula Francis of KLAS-TV in Las Vegas co-anchored five hours of live coverage of the Nevada Caucuses, this self-described “political junkie” worked from an array of 3 x 5 cards she drew up in advance, looking at myriad aspects of the event, its players, its past and its present. She used information from field reporting she’d done previously plus online research and says she felt totally prepared. In an e-mail to me, she closed with “Ask me where the word caucus comes from.”

• The “Who’s Who” in the picture: A candidate is working a receiving line, or perhaps the room is filled with supporters awaiting a candidate’s arrival. Good anchors can rattle off the names and titles of the notables in the picture, and the best can add a little background information on them as well. Ted Perry, of WITI-TV in Milwaukee (disclosure here — I hired Ted when he was just a youngster) masters this skill. He sent this note to me from the newsroom: “As I write this, Michelle Obama is introducing her husband. I’m watching the monitor on my desk and I know if I had to stretch right now, I could kill three minutes talking about her background, how they met, her role in the campaign …” There can be stretching aplenty on election night as events unfold or stall, and it is in those moments viewers will stay with anchors who have something of value to share.

• Wisdom about the vagaries of vote totals as they roll in: On election night, vote totals build throughout the night. If anchors aren’t knowledgeable about state and local voting patterns and reporting protocols, they’re likely to send misleading signals to viewers. Smart anchors don’t report numbers alone, they put them into context. In South Carolina, WIS-TV anchor Judi Gatson had a state map, broken down by county, on the anchor desk, along with notes she’d made about the demographics and voting patterns of each area. In an e-mail, she explained how it paid off:

• Flawless pronunciation of every name on the ballot, however long the ballot may be: In local primary elections, ballots can resemble small phone books, with multiple races and candidates. Question: What’s more important to a human being than his or her identity?  There’s no quicker way for an anchor to lose credibility with candidates, supporters (and even ethnic groups) than to stumble over names on election night. In my newsroom, I encouraged anchors to make personal calls to candidates well before election night to ask for pronunciations. It would be easy to delegate that task to an intern, but smart anchors build credibility and contacts with this personal touch.

• Ownership of Plan B — and C — and D: Like the other anchors mentioned, Nadine Wimmer, of KSL-TV in Salt Lake City, studies up — but she does something else. She tells me she imagines scenarios — like technical problems — that might develop. She then envisions what information she can call up or direction shift she can take. That’s smart. In my newsroom, we always had a pre-election “Murphy’s Law” meeting. We took this last opportunity to envision everything that might go wrong. Our traps might be internal (flawed assumptions, communication or technology) or external (delayed votes, bad weather, cranky politicos, or smart competitors.) Our anchors were a key part of that meeting — so they’d be on top of every alternative we envisioned. 

• Check Twitter to see updates from local users’ Super Tuesday tweets. Some users microblog on Twitter throughout debates. Look and see what kinds of themes, issues, topics the Twitterers are addressing.

• Use terraminds.com to thumb through Twitter updates: I found these updates when I searched for “Super Tuesday.” When I used terraminds.com and searched “Super Tuesday,” I found that Barack Obama has an official Twitter page. Other candidates, such as Mike Huckabee and Hillary Clinton, also have Twitter pages. (Note that if the candidate’s Twitter pages are not mentioned on the candidates’ official Web site — as is the case with Clinton and Huckabee — they may have been created by Twitter users not affiliated with the candidate’s campaign.) By using terraminds.com, I also found that MTV is doing the first-ever live mobile-to-Web broadcast in every Super Tuesday state.

• Gather resources using iGoogle: To get you started, I’ve created an iGoogle page with a few relevant gadgets and RSS feeds. You can add your own RSS feeds or other gadgets, like this one from The Washington Post.

• Use Swivel.com to find community-created graphs, or add your own data to make a graph you can share: Swivel enables you to quickly create graphs using data you type in or upload from a spreadsheet. You can quickly display the results as a tag cloud, graph, chart and even a layer for Google Earth (if you add in the proper geocodes). With the customization tools, you control the color, size and information of the graph. Swivel then outputs a snippet of HTML code you can cut and paste to your site.

• Find relevant Web sites using del.icio.us: When I typed in del.icio.us/tag/election, I found the most interesting interactive content about the elections I had seen yet, like this Flickr image of a chart with all the candidates and their position on a variety of issues, and electicker2008.com.

• Interact with Facebook users and find conversations about the elections and results: Facebook has some features that make covering Super Tuesday more fun. There is a Super Tuesday contest on Facebook, in which users can predict the outcome of the primary elections. There are more than 500 political applications and two pages of “election” Facebook applications. Many of the candidates also have their own Facebook pages.

• See how people are capturing the election through their own lens using Flickr. Search Flickr to see your local users’ photos with candidates, at Super Tuesday parties or at rallies.

What additional tips do you have for covering Super Tuesday?