Wednesday, November 3, 2010

What goes into an election night in the newsroom

The Free Press newsroom is recovering from a wild election night that taxed staffers for hours and at the end had reporters filing stories to editors every five minutes.

That led to more than 40 election stories being posted to our online website as the results began coming in at about 8:30 p.m. It also led to updating those stories several times during the night and producing several additional stories to publish in one print edition that rolled off the presses at about 1:45 a.m. and another so called "remake" with more final results rolling off the presses about 2:30 a.m.

In between we chased down politicians for quotes, pictures and their reaction to their winning or their losing.

In the days before newspapers had online sites, this kind of a night was a bit less hectic. But now we must produce our product on several "platforms" or places readers want to go to find news.

To that end, we were putting short headlines and updates on our Facebook site, that by the way, is automatically connected to our Twitter site.

The effort was one of high quality for a gargantuan task, and I'm proud to be associated with our team.

Readers, print and online, Twitterers and Facebookers were served.

The traffic to our website Tuesday and Wednesday totaled over 120,000 page views, usually the normal amount of traffic for four days.

But the presses ran, the microchips hummed and Democracy was served.

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