Campaign News Media and Political Communication Trends

A Blip Spike for Print: Newspapers and magazines announcing election results are in high demand for archival purposes.  The Washington Post printed 250,000 extra copies November 5 announcing Obama's win and, like other print media, people were clamoring at the doors for copies and newstands were selling out, Poynter reports. Cover Awards has a few front pages of newspapers from Wednesday. Magazine issues, too, are planned to be sell-outs. (update: below the fold I'm listing links to digital media covers and front pages as I find them).

People still want to hold the news in their hands. As after-the-fact mementos.  Print media will soon be a relic. WaPo covered the way people lined up and wanted print copies  for historic purposes.

CNN doubled its audience from 2004 election night
topped NBC, CBS and Fox. 

A study from Pew: "cable news outlets have overtaken the networks as the general news sources that the public watches most regularly. The audiences for the major cable news networks are highly partisan, while the audiences for network TV and the internet are more in line with the general public. Among those who name the Fox News Channel as their main source for campaign news, 52% are Republicans and only 17% are Democrats. By contrast, among those who rely on MSNBC for their campaign news, 50% are Democrats and only 11% are Republicans. Similarly, CNN's campaign news audience is largely Democratic -- 45% are Democrats and 13% are Republicans."  Is this surprising?

CNN.com had more than 5X normal traffic on election night online. Hitwise released election day rankings of top online news sites:
1.Yahoo News
2. CNN
3. MSNBC
4. Google News
5. FOXNews
6. Drudge Report
7. The New York Times
8. FOXNews.com Elections
9. USA Today
10. ABCnews.com
11. The Huffington Post
12. AOL News
13. Real Clear Politics
14. The Washington Post
15. CNN Political Ticker

Online trends  from Search Engine Watch: Barack Obama completely won out over John McCain online when it came to links, with nearly 2 million links to www.barackobama.com, but just over 900,000 links to www.johnmccain.com and data shows that "Democrats are more active online than Republicans. Democrats are more likely to participate in online communities, and say they're more heavily influenced in their voting decisions by information they find online."  

Sage Lewis writes that Obama's political communications online were built for interaction and community and generated engagement with his audience. "One of the most visionary, forward-thinking actions of Obama's campaign was hiring Chris Hughes, the co-founder of Facebook, to act as coordinator of online organizing within the Obama presidential campaign on My.BarackObama.com, the campaign's online social networking Web site," Lewis says.

Two tech savvy trends to note:

• The day after the election, Obama had a new site up: Change.Gov for the office of the president-elect, logo at left, and the site welcomes comments.






• The day after the election the Twitter Blog had a banner up, left, with the headline OMG, That Was a Big Day - Congratulations @barackobama, it looks like you'll be the first President of the United States to have an official Twitter account. Also, thanks for taking part in an event that had a dramatic effect on Twitter activity and exposure worldwide. (I checked and Obama tweeted before noon on the day after Election Day a note of thanks to his fellow Twitterers). 

For those who didn't get print copies, here are links to media covers and front page rendered digitally and I will add links as I find them..
Wednesday Newspaper Front Pages US and Worldwide editions
Newspapers announcing Obama Win
hat tip to JDLasica for above two links
Obama headlines from Nov. 5 via Sandi
Election night screenshots from major news websites

Comments

[Kay Dennison]

Thanks for the Info and the links!

[H.A. Page]

I've just seen that the NYTimes commemorative newspaper is on ebay for $100, but can't track this down to see if it is true.

[Kathy]

I can't believe that I let our NYT out with the recycling! Aargh!!

I think you'll get a kick out of this Mental Floss post about how some newspapers buried the news about Obama's win the next day. So much for a liberal media bias!!
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/20012