Internet and election

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Internet sizzles and fizzles with election coverage

November 8, 2000 Web posted at: 2:28 p.m. EST (1928 GMT)

(CNN) -- The Internet offered some advantages over
television broadcasts in delivering national election
results Tuesday night. But when answering the question
anxious Americans sought most -- who will be the
president -- the younger news medium experienced the
same pitfalls as the old one.

News organizations updated sites frequently with exit
poll or election results for national, state and local
races. Some sites featured chats, video clips, constant
coverage from campaign headquarters and highlighted U.S.
maps to tally electoral votes for the president.

Many news sites posted returns as fast as they got them,
while TV viewers watched highlights at most. At one news
site, visitors could pull up their local results by
entering a ZIP code. Election returns were the most
popular feature at Yahoo!'s site.

"That's really the strength of the Internet," said
Kourosh Karimkhany, a Yahoo! senior news producer. "This
year, perhaps TV is doing a better job providing a
summary, but to get minute-by-minute blows, no other
media can compete."

Scott Woelfel, president and editor in chief of CNN.com,
said television and the Internet worked more as partners
than rivals in their election coverage.

"I think what you saw were two mediums that complemented
each other well. You had a narrative on television,
which raised questions and issues that people could
explore on the Internet," he said.

In coverage of the white-knuckle presidential race,
scores of news organizations continued updating sites in
the early morning hours. Many prematurely declared Texas
Gov. George W. Bush the winner over Vice President Al
Gore, even after TV networks rescinded projections for
Florida and its key 25 electoral votes.

Records broken

Nevertheless, news Web sites broke records Tuesday as
millions followed the nail-biting elections online.

CNN.com had 100 million page views for all of Tuesday,
which shatters the previous record of 40 million set on
October 12 of this year. The average number of daily
page views on CNN.com is 22 million.

A page view is recorded whenever a user pulls up a new
page or updates an old one. So someone frequently
updating a page of election results would be counted
multiple times.

Allen Weiner, an analyst at Internet measurement company
NetRatings Inc., called Election Day "the first monster
event on the Web."

He expected heavy traffic Wednesday as well because some
newspapers, particularly in the East, missed deadlines
to print late results. Some newspapers, including in
Florida, prematurely declared Bush the winner in early
morning editions.

Media struggles with timing, volume

Echoing the famously incorrect "Dewey defeats Truman"
headline, numerous newspapers prematurely blared a Bush
victory on their front pages Thursday morning, including
early editions of The Atlanta Constitution and The New
York Times.

The print and Web editions of USA Today were among the
media that managed to hold back on declaring a winner.

"We never declared him (Bush) a winner," said Kinsey
Wilson, vice president and editor in chief of USA.com.

"We reported that the networks declared him a winner,
but we chose to take the more conservative route and
wait until The Associated Press or we called the race,"
he said.

In contrast to other news Web sites, Wilson added, "I
was thankful last night that we didn't have a broadcast
parent pressuring us to call the race at the first
possible moment."

MSNBC.com posted a story on its site saying it
experienced technical glitches early Wednesday morning
that resulted in some users receiving outdated content
about the elections.

In some cases users saw data and stories that conflicted
with other information on the site, said Merrill Brown,
MSNBC.com editor in chief.

Brown told CNN.com the problems were directly related to
the high volume of traffic experienced by the site and
lasted from about 6 a.m. to 11 a.m. EST.

"The current headlines were finding servers that weren't
updating the new content," Brown said. "The servers were
not keeping up with the ability to change pages."

MSNBC.com apologized to users for the problem.

Several Web sites experienced delays because of the
heavy traffic.

"It has been worse than I anticipated," said Dan Todd,
spokesman for Keynote Systems Inc., which monitors Web
site performance and found a long list of sites that
were taking over 20 seconds to update Web pages at peak
usage times. The industry average is less than four
seconds.

Regardless, the Internet will most likely take on a
greater role in the 2004 race for the White House.

"In the next election a significant number of votes will
be cast online. That's going to change the dynamic even
more in how the Internet is used as an electoral tool,"
Woelfel said.

"You can point to rise of absentee ballots this year.
People are choosing alternate methods to vote, which
bodes well for Internet voting."

CNN.com Writer Richard Stenger, The Associated Press &
Reuters contributed to this report.