GMANews.TV's election coverage sets new site records

On May 11, when Filipinos all over the world were eager to know how the nation's first automated elections were going, GMANews.TV registered 12.4 million page views, easily a new site record for one of the Philippines' leading news sites. It was more than three times the page views during Cory Aquino's funeral, the site's previous high. Many of the page views went to GMANews.TV's ground-breaking election tally, the fastest and most comprehensive in the country. Within a couple of hours of the polls closing on the evening of May 10, the tally had established trends for Sen. Noynoy Aquino's victory, as well as at least half a dozen senatorial candidates. The speed was unheard-of in the bygone era of manual elections. Election returns (ERs) were transmitted electronically from voting machines around the country to a Comelec server managed by election watchdog PPCRV. But GMA News and Public Affairs had to aggregate the results to derive the national totals. GMANews.TV's national tally page has been shared nearly 30,000 times through Facebook, another record for the site. Interactive 'election dashboard' "We credit our brilliant programmers for developing the software that added the results accurately and quickly," said Howie Severino, GMANews.TV's editor-in-chief. New Media, Inc., a subsidiary of GMA Network, created the applications that tallied the results, which had to be labeled "partial and unofficial," Comelec's condition for receiving the data in a format that could be processed. Then the totals for leading national candidates were displayed on an interactive "election dashboard" designed by multimedia editor Paolo Ferrer: The dashboard featured regional breakdowns for the vote and was another popular election feature on the site. UPDATE: GMANews.TV has just released the interactive ELEKSYON 2010 PROVINCIAL TALLY DASHBOARD, with partial and unofficial tally figures for national candidates per province. The dashboard and comprehensive tallies were only the giant tips of GMANews.TV's coverage iceberg that was months in the making. GMANews.TV had prepared in various ways for a deluge from an online Filipino community anxious to know the outcome of the country’s first automated polls. More than half of the site's over six million visitors per month are located abroad, many of whom keep updated on Philippine news mostly through the Internet. The plunge into social media In anticipation of the elections, GMANews.TV had been building up its presence across social media platforms since late last year, notably on Facebook and Twitter. Secondary presences were also set up on Yahoo!, Plurk, and other networks. As early as January 2010, GMANews.TV had initiated a unique feature among online news organizations: Rapid Reports posted on the site's Facebook fan page, which would also be tweeted and embedded on GMANews.TV's home page. Reporters posting short news updates live from the field has been done before, but the idea was adapted to suit our large community of Facebook users (nearly 68,000 fans and counting). Rapid Reports Rapid Reports made use of Facebook’s greater message-length capability – as opposed to Twitter’s more concise 140 character limit – to provide more informative real-time reports. The reports were then shortened and re-broadcast to Twitter and other social networks. The Rapid Reports continue to feature prominently on the GMNews.TV homepage, sometimes prompting over a hundred comments on a single rapid report. This interaction with our online audience, coupled with updated news feeds direct from our main website, led to a big boost in GMANews.TV’s Facebook Fanbase: the community had grown by 187% in the first quarter of 2010 alone. Our Twitter following, for its part, grew by at least 20% over the same period. Rapid Reports played a vital role at the height of the election coverage, as GMA News and Public Affair's reporters were able to update the public virtually in real time from across the country. Some of the most compelling Rapid Reports included breaking news on a bomb explosion at a local gas station in Maguindanao, as well as a large cache of firearms confiscated in Masbate. Scoops from the crowd YouScoop, GMA News and Public Affair’s online citizen journalism initiative, was yet another way in which the web community was tapped for election coverage. The eager involvement of concerned citizens online, spurred by our social media initiatives, helped familiarize the public with the idea of citizen journalism via YouScoop. YouScoop augmented GMA News and Public Affair’s professionally gathered reports from the field on election day itself, receiving an average of 50 online submissions and hundreds of SMS submissions per hour. Through the initiative, concerned citizens across the country were able to report everything from campaign violations to alleged vote-buying attempts, and they could view on the YouScoop map what others had reported. Interactive mapping GMANews.TV also capitalized on its strengths in interactive mapping, pioneered in late 2009 initially for mapping disasters such as the twin typhoons Ondoy and Pepeng. Beginning in February, GMANews.TV began compiling a campaign sorties database and interactive map , showing the campaign trails of each of the presidential candidates. View 2010 Election Campaign Map in a larger map The map showed, for example, that only three of the nine major presidential candidates visited Palawan: Erap Estrada, Bro. Eddie Villanueva, and Manny Villar. Also, only Noynoy Aquino and Erap Estrada visited Mindoro. Traditional journalism The innovations helped GMANews.TV compete despite less text content than some of its competitors. But the site also made its mark in old-fashioned research and investigative journalism. Its series on Hacienda Luisita by Stephanie Dychiu was the most comprehensive examination of an issue that will continue to face Sen. Noynoy Aquino even as he assumes the presidency. The Lusiita series was cited by the Philippine Journalism Review, shared widely through social media, and called "authoritative" by veteran political columnist Belinda Cunanan. GMANews.TV's coverage of Manny Villar likewise created buzz, with an interactive map that showed the controversial C-5 road's realignment through Villar properties and an investigation of his Tondo childhood that debunked his claims to extreme poverty. But even these traditional approaches to journalism were enhanced by new media tools such as hyperlinks and Flash animation. The site also assigned famed documentary photographer Rick Rocamora to document the elections and produce photo essays commemorating a historic period. Record numbers GMANews.TV's all-time record number of visitors, derived from Google Analytics, likewise boosted the site’s Alexa traffic rankings: What did you like most of GMANews.TV’s election coverage? Let us know in our Facebook poll! - GMANews.TV