Looking for resources to make your election night content better than ever?
There’s tons of help out there and we have rounded up ideas, embeds and tools that can help make your election night smooth and awesome for your readers.
1. Google’s Midterm Elections Trends
Google has developed some useful tools for newsrooms that can help uncover some interesting local trends.
One of the more interesting ones is this tool that allows you to see search terms by state and dig into the political terms that people are searching for.
You can also see most searched party by county and dig into questions that people are searching for around the election. This could be really useful as you build FAQ guides for readers.
2. Flourish offers ready-to-go interactive
Flourish, a data visualization company, has put together this really nice list of seven ways you can use their tools to create interactives.
For local media, there are two I particularly like:
• The horserace chart helps a reader understand how candidates have been running in polls. As Flourish notes, the day after the election, this is an interesting view. Also, this is quite effective if you wanted to show how different counties have voted over the years for different parties or any election history for that matter.
• In an effort to visualize for your audience what the House looks like for your state, this is a good pre-election and post-election tool to use.
3. Know how to fact check
Politico is the source when it comes to fact checking. While you don’t necessarily need to rank a politician’s claim the way Politico does (pants on fire, etc.), learning from their approach with how they fact check, is helpful. Here is a look at their fact check guide. This could be useful for a news organization as they continue to cover races up to election and then on election night.