Sender: owner-online-news@planetarynews.com
Precedence: bulk
Status: O
X-Status: 

At 09:32 AM 11/6/96 -0500, Ford Risley wrote:
>We'll be talking about online reporting of the election results in my
>Online Media class this afternoon, so if anyone is awake (or coherent) yet
>I'd be interested in hearing reports from folks about how things worked
>last night. Hard numbers, of course, would be welcome, but I'd also like to
>pass along to my student your exciting moments, horror stories, and just
>interesting anecdotes in general. Many thanks.


Ford,

This won't be in time for your class, but you may be interested in my
experience.  I live in rural, Eastern Washington, oh about 75 miles south of
Spokane, WA, and 260 or so east of Seattle and a bit more distant from
Tacoma.  I parked myself in front of Dan Rather via a Spokane television
station last night to watch the election results.  Journalistically, I have
a couple different observations/reports.

ONE
About 10:30 p.m. (Pacific Standard)  I got disgusted with the Spokane CBS
affiliate's Mickey Mouse local reporting.  They were reporting only Spokane
and surrounding county results, ZERO state-wide data.  I was learning more
from Dan about Washington State races than I was from my "local" tv, which
was reporting totally meaningless data.  So I trooped off to the den and
cruised the web.  I went to Tacoma's News Tribune web site, which is one of
the good ones, in my opinion.  They had data as of something like 1:03 a.m.
Eastern Standard; i.e., they were about 30 minutes off real time.  And they
had at least some Washington state-wide data, even though our polls hadn't
closed until 8 p.m.  Finding that none of the races or issues that I was
interested in were in any doubt, I went to bed.  Incidentally, I noted
elections across the country were available, and did some spot checking to
see how the WWW was working for the election in various states where I have
interests and/or family, especially California and Utah.

Point is, I was getting fresher, more complete data off a WWW site nearly
300 miles away than I was getting broadcast into my home by the local
station only 75 miles away.

CBS, of course, was giving good, hard data in real time, but not necessarily
the data I wanted.  Especially not when I wanted it.  AND WITHOUT COMMERCIALS.

TWO
As I was abandoning television for the night, I flipped to Sam Donaldson.
Wound up wishing that I'd been with him all night.  ABC's graphics were a
bit dated--at least not as visually exciting--but they were ever-so-much
more functional than Rather's.  CBS may well have had the techiest set, but
it was NOT viewer friendly.  

And that's my two bucks' worth.

Terry
++++++++++++++++++++++++
GENEALOGY IS IN MY GENES
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Terence L. Day 
401 Hulbert Hall, Washington State University, Pullman, WA 99164-6244
509/335-2806 (Office voice), 509/335-2863 (Office fax), 509/334-1619 (Home)
Internet:   or 
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Posted to ONLINE-NEWS. Made possible by Nando.net - http://www.nando.net

From owner-online-newspapers@nando.net Wed Nov  6 23:12:40 1996
Received: from parsifal.nando.net (root@parsifal.nando.net [152.52.2.7]) by cnj.digex.net (8.6.12/8.6.12) with ESMTP id XAA27059 ; for ; Wed, 6 Nov 1996 23:12:40 -0500
Received: (from root@localhost) by parsifal.nando.net (8.7/8.6.9) id WAA20378 for online-newspapers-outgoing; Wed, 6 Nov 1996 22:03:10 -0500 (EST)
Received: from server.indra.com (server.indra.com [204.144.142.2]) by parsifal.nando.net (8.7/8.6.9) with ESMTP id WAA20241; Wed, 6 Nov 1996 22:01:56 -0500 (EST)
Received: from indra.com by server.indra.com (8.7.6/Spike-8-1.0)
	id UAA14797; Wed, 6 Nov 1996 20:00:39 -0700 (MST)
Received: from relay-7.mail.demon.net by indra.com (8.8.0/Spike-8-1.0)
	id UAA29432; Wed, 6 Nov 1996 20:00:36 -0700 (MST)
Received: from crecon.demon.co.uk ([158.152.71.145]) by relay-5.mail.demon.net
           id aa500390; 7 Nov 96 0:31 GMT
Message-ID: 
To: Ulrich Hegge 
Cc: online-news@planetarynews.com, online-newspapers@planetarynews.com