Midterms 2018: The best result pages
The News Porn “roundups” highlight the best ideas & formats in digital journalism, for specific news topics.
In this piece, we tear down the best-designed result trackers from this year’s midterm elections in the US.
The New York Times’s dashboard is clear yet exhaustive. The main map is interactive so you can jump in and select your district, without leaving the page. The map also has a cartogram mode (that means each State is represented depending on the number of seats in play rather than by surface area), which is cooler than you think. The dashboard also highlights results for the key races on the right side of your screen. It surfaces takeaways from reporters in a nice horizontal live feed. And you don’t even have to scroll that much.
The WashPost’s live tracker might be slightly less straightforward, but it has some good ideas. Among them: a sticky header with the general results for the 3 elections and quick links to live coverage.
As always, Bloomberg’s team made some pretty bold choices. First up, the default results map is a cartogram, which is easier to read and makes more political sense. Readers can also use handy filters like “key races” or “races with women”. Plus: Bloomberg’s modern-brutalist graphic style is always a pleasure to watch.
This tracker is what we’d expect from AP: clear and effective (without all the fuzz other publishers might have). A simple hover on the map gets you the local results.
Axios’s live map is a bit like AP’s, except it has subtly more information (like which State has flipped), a cartogram mode and a less boring design.
Politico has maybe the most text-heavy page — at least you can’t miss who’s winning. But most interestingly, the website developed a sort of live commenting system for its journalists, that lives in a chatbot-like interface and is also surfaced in local results pages.
I like The Guardian’s sticky header which shows the most recent results. Otherwise, the page is sadly too crowded (the usual symbol-heavy art direction does not work well in this context) and the choice of hexagons to represent each district makes it honestly more complicated to read the results.
Yup, that might be a shocker but Apple’s news app (you know, this ‘sane’ platform) was maybe where most citizens followed the midterms party. And the teams at Cupertino clearly did things well, with a dedicated Midterms section with live results. It’s beautifully designed — but that’s surely not good news for publishers.
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