With a Pew Research survey just days before Barack Obama’s election finding the Internet is now second only to television as a primary campaign news source for Americans, election night seemed the perfect time for a coverage comparison.  For the new media side, I chose my personal favorites, Markos Moulitsas’ Daily Kos and Arianna Huffington’s Huffington Post online journal.  For TV, I took my personal favorites NBC/MSNBC and perennial standby CNN.

Somewhat surprisingly – at least for me – TV largely annihilated the Internet and digital new media players.  It was a reversal of the 2006 congressional election coverage, when the politically savvy Moulitsas and company ran circles around the TV election teams.  With control of the Senate at stake, Moulitsas delivered continual real time analyses of key races, and races not so key.

This year, Huffington inexplicably went indefinitely motionless after the first polls had closed, while Daily Kos repeatedly trailed TV’s state-by-state projections by 30 minutes or more.  Moulitsas did manage one early and excellent analysis on the close race of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, showing the Republican leader would likely prevail.

One notable place new media prevailed was its “why wait for the TV to tell you” interactivity as demonstrated by the Daily Kos live election map appearing above.  But some of the interactive tools — notably the “Race Calculator” — are for the most rapid followers of politics.  TV’s “easy chair” non-interactive delivery is more than enough for most election watchers.

All in all, I turned off my computer fairly quickly – though not before using the Internet’s greatest service: Huffington Post’s revelation of the key state exit poll results, hinting at a huge Obama win.  While the TV teams kept the key poll results secret, if you “read between the lines” of what was being said it was clear an Obama win was readily expected.  But it was in TV’s best interest to have the early appearance of a tight race, because it meant higher ratings.  Which is why, at least a glance at the web can be very useful on election nights.

Finally, speaking of polls – kudos to Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com.  He was nearly perfect on predicting Obama’s final six point advantage.

All said, I suppose pitting TV and web election coverage against each other is largely moot.  Each has its unique strengths, and the two are clearly destined to converge into highly complimentary mass communication tools sharing the same monitors.

Bill Bartman is an independent correspondent, investigative reporter, and consultant for print, broadcast, and digital new media.  He also consults telecommunications and information technology ventures.

Article Tags: Arianna Huffington | CNN | Daily Kos | Digital New media | Huffington Post | internet | Markos Moulitsas | Mitch McConnell | MSNBC | Nate Silver | NBC

Filed under: Election, Interactive, TV