The Graphics and Interactive News desks rolled out some new visual elements as part of The Times’s midterm election coverage that have been months in the planning. Steve Duenes, the graphics director, describes some of them.
There are election maps and tables on a lot of sites. How do you try to distinguish The Times from competitors?
We have a number of goals going into any significant election. We want to meet our readers’ basic needs, and we want to give them something they don’t see anywhere else. Meeting the basic needs is a tall order by itself, because of the number of platforms we’re serving, including desktop computers, tablets and mobile. It’s a fair amount of work to wrangle the data and generate a smooth flow into the maps without any hiccups, given the number of peculiarities when it comes to geography, candidates and state procedures.
It’s true that you find maps and tables elsewhere, but we don’t think everything is equal. There’s real value in designing our basic results so that they’re clear, and so they point readers toward the races that are interesting. For example, in 2008 we built a simple table to show the important contests. It’s essentially just a set of columns, but it allows readers to scan across dozens of races while easily focusing on the tightest. Other news organizations have copied the form, and now it’s pretty standard.
When it comes to offering our readers something special, we try to do that in a couple of ways. First, we aim to build some analysis into most of our graphics, arming readers with tools to understand why races were won and lost and offering context. For some elections, we’ve allowed readers to sort the results with demographic filters like race and income. In other elections, we’ve quickly generated smaller analytical figures as part of a live blog.
What did you do in this election that you didn’t do in 2012?
There are a couple of new things. First, the rise of statistical modeling as a tool to better understand political preferences is pretty well known, and earlier this year, The New York Times launched The Upshot partly as a way to build on the data-intensive efforts in the 2012 election.
On Tuesday, The Upshot published a model that adjusted Senate returns based on where the votes were coming from and on current and historical returns in places that had yet to report.
To borrow from an Upshot article explaining the approach:
In states like Virginia, Georgia and elsewhere, cities have traditionally been among the last to report their votes. Because cities lean Democratic, this pattern means that returns for Democratic candidates will appear weaker than they actually are for a few hours after the polls close. Similarly, in states with slow-counting Republican areas, Republican candidates will seem weaker than they actually are.
The result was a sophisticated way to watch the election unfold, giving readers a much better sense of how close the race really looked. Instead of guessing how races would go based on incomplete numbers, our readers had a much clearer picture.
We also published a series of maps that show precinct-level results. The data for these highly detailed maps doesn’t come as part of an Associated Press feed. To get it, we sent scores of emails, tracking down maps that showed the boundaries of each precinct from dozens of state and local officials, and then we had to set up a way to “scrape” the numbers from many different websites.
But it was worth it. These maps show readers what happened in individual neighborhoods, revealing a political topography that doesn’t come across at the county level.
