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Election night proves the Web is not yet ready for prime time
"Long after it was apparent that the Democrats had not gone down like the Titanic, newspaper web sites had only a dry regurgitation of the numbers."
Back before I started working in newspapers, I helped out in some political campaigns. I never seemed to work for a winner, but the excitement associated with the election night party was electrifying -- something about staying up all night, eating bad food and then going out for a few drinks.
It's probably what made me want to go to work for morning newspapers.
It stayed pretty much like that when I worked for newspapers in Florida, Louisiana and New York. On election night, we'd stay up too late, eat bad food and then go out for a few drinks.
Things changed a few years back when I began working day shifts. When elections rolled around, I went out, voted a couple of times, went to work and waited for the evening news to come on.
Cable TV changed things again. People with bad hair would come on cable TV and tell me all day long what was happening and what it all meant; mostly it meant they didn't know much.
Broadcast TV started limiting its coverage to quickies tucked in between the regularly scheduled programming, and newspapers didn't come out until the next morning, which left me in the lurch.
Then the Internet came along. I had hoped that newspapers would be able to combine the immediacy available through the Web with their traditional strengths of context and balance, so I stayed up last Tuesday night to see how things went.
What I mostly got was annoyed.
In the early going, as polls closed on the East Coast, there was a lot of Associated Press copy showing up all over the place. I got plenty of tabular material showing the results with zero percent of the precincts reporting sitting next to stories listing the winners in those same races.
The Web's breadth caused some problems for me. A quick check of the Orange County Register site, for example, left me a bit confused. I had wanted to check on several California elections and knew that there would be updates beginning at 9 p.m. My clock clearly showed that it was well after the prescribed hour, but there were no updates. It took a minute to figure out that they meant 9 p.m. Pacific time.
An early trip to the New York Times web site also was frustrating, with links leading in a loop. By midnight (Eastern), that was corrected as the Times started posting staff and wire data and stories.
The Times, one of the most popular news sites on the Web, did not expect any problems from overload, and apparently did not have any.
"The big question is what sort of usage we'll get," Bernard Gwertzman, senior editor for the Electronic Media Group for the Times, had told me Tuesday afternoon. "The last election was 1996, our first year in operation, and we had 700,000 hits. Now we're able to handle three million a day."
The Tampa Tribune also was prepared for the load, having been forced to upgrade its servers after they crashed under the load brought about by Hurricane Georges. The Tribune also is an old hand at this, having started in the early '90s on Prodigy. What was a huge number of hits for the Tribune in the early days is just an average day now.
"We got 30,000 hits an hour with Hurricane Georges," said Rick Scheuerman, the editor for Tampa Bay Online. "Unless [Democratic gubernatorial candidate Kenneth] Mackay does a 'Dewey defeats Truman,' we won't see that kind of usage."
"Server not found" and "server busy" messages were endemic throughout the night, something that was more than an annoyance. The problems did not appear to be at the sites themselves; it seemed overloads along the way caused my browser to time out.
At the sites I could reach, the wealth of data I had expected to find was either unavailable or deeply buried. Interactive maps, streaming video and other multimedia technologies were few and far between, even on the TV network sites that normally excel in their use.
Analysis, something at which newspapers excel, also was sorely lacking. Long after it was apparent that the Democrats had not gone down like the Titanic, newspaper web sites had only a dry regurgitation of the numbers. At least the Atlanta Journal and Constitution displayed information in a clear chart on the opening page, a pleasing touch after trying to wade through links elsewhere.
The winner in Tuesday's elections? Cable TV. Broadcast TV had two hours of coverage, opting instead for the likes of Spin City (a rerun from last year) in the early going. Somewhere between late afternoon and early evening, C-SPAN, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC and others replaced those shrill commentators with people providing updated numbers and insightful analysis, backed up by audio, visuals, scrolling tickers and multimedia.
You know. Like the Web.
Now, if they could just send me bad food and a couple of drinks early in the morning, I'd be happy.
-- Steven E. Brier
From NEWSINC., Nov. 9, 1998, Copyright © 1998, All Rights Reserved.