Working Election Night

For me, last night was a completely new experience. I worked an Election Night in the newsroom for the first time. It was pretty exhilarating and fun.

It was good to have KOMU.com director Jen Reeves on hand to help with the organization of our site's reporting of election results.

Jen reminded me to tell reporters to update the scene at area election parties via Twitter and Twitpic. The campaign worked to an extent. At least one more reporter than usual sent in updates. We had a YFrog image from the site of the party for Columbia's newly elected mayor, which was great. We had hoped to create a slideshow of Twitpics from reporters, but we never did get enough in.

As results came in to the newsroom, there was quickly pressure to confirm the results and update them via our @KOMUNews Twitter account. One of the first election result reports we had was a council race that was decided, although we didn't reflect the final count on our Web site yet. The Boone County Web site did have final results and it was determined our Web site was just slow updating, so I posted confirmation of the winner to Twitter.

All of the results from Boone County seemed to finalized at around the same time, around 9:40 p.m. So I was confirming and updating as fast as I could via CoTweet. I didn't know everything would come in essentially at once.

At the end of the night, we updated our Web site with an overall election story, a story about Columbia's new mayor, the Columbia School District bond issue and the downtown camera proposition. I thought the front page looked great at the end of the night. I also linked a separate live interview we did with the new mayor to the mayor story. It served almost like a "Web extra."

This was a really fun night with a lot of important issues and races to report on. I was glad I finally got to be involved in Election Night coverage.