News Habits & Media

How did newspapers play the Nov 7 election on their front page? Did they see an ideological realignment in the country, or some deeper shift? A review of the day-after headlines in 230 newspapers across the country reveals that it was nothing quite so dramatic and many tread closer to Sergeant Joe Friday’s “Just the Facts, Ma’am.”

There was no shortage once again on cable and elsewhere in which pundits were asked how the midterm election would come out, something that of course by its nature was unknowable in advance. The general consensus among political prognosticators was that Nov. 7 was going to bring Democratic gains in Congress. Among a group of the most widely quoted election oracles, no one hit exactly what the final House tally appears likely to come out, but one prognosticator got very close.

As we've seen during this election season, participating online can also motivate users to participate offline.

The final tally from the mid-term election is in—you know the poll in which people actually vote—and the media polls can now be graded. With each election, there are more media outlets, and more polls. Usually, the polls begin to converge as election day nears. This year, the polls varied widely. How did they stack up against the actual vote?

As 11 p.m. neared on November 7 and the networks were about to sign off, NBC projected the Democrats would take control of the House though the results of many races were still out. It soon had company. In the next 21 minutes, all the networks and cable channels made their calls as well on what was still a fairly fluid map. This was the most the networks would do on a difficult night.

Political fund-raising, campaigning, blogging and YouTubing are all on the rise, but they're still a small part of the election scene.

Is the internet the lever for direct democracy? Or is it a wedge for political polarization? An assessment of the first 10 years of online politics.

Problems with exit polls affected the last three election cycles and wreaked havoc with media coverage of the 2000 and 2004 presidential balloting. With the crucial 2006 midterm election upon us, exit pollsters hope they’ve resolved those troubling issues. What is the status of the poll?

The new numbers released this week were bad enough for a newspaper industry that lost nearly 3% of its circulation in the last year. But when you factor in subscriber discounts, the economic picture gets worse. And the industry’s efforts to compensate for decreasing circulation with increasing online readership may not stand up to scrutiny.

Nielsen Media Research, the gold standard in the TV ratings industry, has announced that it will release numbers in December that show how many people actually sit through commercials on TV. That new yardstick will affect how much advertisers will pay to air those ads and will very possibly alter the economics of the TV marketplace. And not everyone in the TV business is happy about this.