In an earlier column, “ >Not being prescriptive ” (April 7, 2014), I had explained the difference between the Indian media and the Anglo-American media in covering elections. I examined the limitations of media endorsement of a candidate or a party in the West and how it could become more reductionist in the Indian context.
I would like to provide examples from this newspaper’s coverage of the recently concluded elections in five States to substantiate my earlier claims: “Indian election is a polyphonic manifestation of more than a billion people. The Hindu tries to capture these multiple aspirations and expectations across the country, bring out the salient features of what each party or candidate represents, and what their core competencies are. It also highlights the need for a plural social fabric and alerts readers whenever this multitude is threatened by a monochromatic vision. The aim is to enable the readers to exercise an informed choice rather than being prescriptive.”
Tropes and new tools The two-months-long sustained coverage was a combination of classical journalistic tropes like party beats, interviews, analysis of past performances, evaluation of manifestos, and new tools provided by data journalism and digital convergence platforms. The package vindicated International Centre for Journalists’ Knight Fellow Christopher Guess’s observation that “to the hammer, everything’s a nail. But to the data journalist, everything can’t be a graph.” The extensive visualisations stood out as fine examples of providing a context for every number. And the narratives derived their strength not only from a range of empirical figures and statistics, but also field reports.
In a crowded information space, especially dominated by 24X7 television news channels, it was heartening to see many readers logging in to this newspaper’s website. Let me share some audience metrics on counting day: the desktop site had page views exceeding 5.2 million; unique page views were 37,90,736 with peak number of concurrent views hitting a high of 36,141. A similar spike was witnessed on the mobile site too: total pages views were 2,596,586, unique page views were 18,84,068, and peak number of concurrent views touched 25,890. I am yet to get the numbers for The Hindu apps from the service provider.
Interactive maps for all the five States were powered by data continually scraped from the Election Commission website. By hovering over a map or through ‘search’, constituency-level data on leads and margins was made available. It was a coordinated effort by the Internet team, the editorial, developers, designers, data experts, and the IT infrastructure team. Thirty articles were published between 7 a.m. and 8 p.m., most of them generated by the Internet team. There were quick profiles, and a list of big winners and losers in the five States. The Internet desk worked with four different bureaus, coordinating via Whatsapp from polling day till counting day. There was also close coordination with the photographers and reporters. There was real-time transmission of news and analysis from our journalists on counting day.
The high number of page views on counting day was because of the cumulative result of two months of work. In print, the special national page began on March 16 as a daily feature, barring weekends. PollStat, an insightful data analysis, became an integral part of this feature from April 12. This section featured ground reports, sideline short stories, data analyses, cartoons, and a few stories based on big data.
For the Web, five subsections were created on the site, one for each State, with good Search Engine Optimisation in consultation with the SEO expert on the KSL digital team. All election-related stories from the States, both from print and online-first, were carried in their respective subsections. The team used open source scripts to source data from the Election Commission of India and visualise it live for the website in the form of maps and live trends. It used only the Election Commission’s data, so that it would remain authentic and credible under pressure. The final double spread in print provided in-depth information including maps, seat visualisation, “hit rates” and “contested seats vote shares”.
Personally, the story that caught my imagination was “ >The tyranny of invalid votes: A reality check ” (April 27, 2016), a statistical story that established that invalid votes strongly affected mandates in 313 of 35,937 constituencies in polls between 1961 and 2003. The story also explained how Electronic Voting Machines finally eliminated this menace that distorted the will of the people.
However, the sharp editorial, “ >Tamil Nadu’s direct cash transfers ” (May 19, 2016), failed to answer a few questions regarding the newspaper’s reportage: why were there no major reports on money power? What was the modus operandi of the political parties to distribute money when the model code of conduct was in place? What was the role of the Election Commission and other law enforcement agencies? I think if The Hindu had managed to uncover the extent of the free flow of money and the key players involved in this act of coercion, that would have made the election coverage truly comprehensive.
readerseditor@thehindu.co.in
