Election Night in an online newsroom

Last night I spent about eight hours in the washingtonpost.com newsroom from about 6 p.m. until 2 a.m. helping them with midterm election coverage. I didn't know what to expect when my boss asked me to work last week on Election Night, but I was definitely excited to see how a newsroom functioned on such an important night. I imagined yelling and screaming and running around the newsroom, but to my surprise Election Night was ironically calm.

The night started out really slow. It was my job to watch AP's vote count page and determine who won all of the House races and how many party switches there were. Once the Democrats gained a seat I would tell my boss who would post a +1 on our Web site graphic. Nothing was happening at first -- AP was calling races that were mostly safe seats and it wasn't until about 8:30 that I actually saw a switch.

While things did speed up, the newsroom wasn't as crazy as I had expected. There was no yelling and people were doing their assigned jobs. There was the occasional outburst when CNN would call a race that the AP hadn't called yet and we had to decide if we should call it or not, but that was the extent of the drama.

I thought about how working in an online newsroom probably compares to a traditional newsroom on Election Night. In many ways, the online newsroom's role might be more important. We had to make sure our graphic of how many seats Democrats were gaining in the House and the Senate was correct because that's the first thing that people see when they come to the site.

While writing the breaking news stories for the site is important (and maybe that's where the newsroom yelling and screaming comes in that I envisioned) making sure our polling was correct and our graphics were accurate and our ticker running across the top of the site that was calling races was correct, was the most important thing the Washington Post was doing at that point. That's why people come to the site on Election Night. To help them keep track of who's winning and who's losing.

I think, overall, this shows how important online journalism has become. Last night the competition wasn't between the print organizations, it was between their Web sites, and who had the most up-to-date results, who was displaying it the simplest for readers and who was the most accurate. Don't you think?