A Brave Old World?

Last year, I conducted a mini-study on Election Night to learn how quickly the state’s newspapers were posting results online. I found that the newspaper websites were providing the information just as quickly as radio and TV. The results of my mini-study are online in a paper titled Has Election Coverage Entered a Brave New World?

This year, however, I found it much more difficult to navigate the newspaper websites and obtain results. Not only did electronic media such as NJN have the results of the key races faster, the station also had them accurately. For example, long after John Adler had delivered his victory speech in the Third District Congressional election, the Courier Post still had incomplete results on its website indicating Chris Meyers was ahead in the race.

Perhaps we can chalk this up to the cutbacks and layoffs that have the news industry in New Jersey this year. If so, we may have taken a step away from the brave new world that election reporting entered last year.