Iowa: a short review of this morning’s web coverage
At 6.00am this morning in London if you wanted to find out what happened in the Iowa caucuses, the natural place to go was the web. I wanted to see how the serious news organisations compared. Here was an event whose timing and significance had been known for months and months. There were no good excuses for not covering it well.
The BBC looked silly since the scrolling news ticker at the top of the page was still announcing that Obama “looked set to win according to media predictions” when its own news story below said that he had already won convincingly. The Beeb’s single story was okay, adequate, but like much BBC reporting it was blandly superficial. You didn’t get a sense of what was really going on. There was no analysis and no detailed count of results.
Andrew Ward for the FT in Iowa produced a straight news story leading FT.com’s world page by 6.00am but again I was surprised not to read any analysis or comment by the FT’s army of wise and opinionated staff both in the US and UK. Nor was there a full list of the results which, by that time, was easily available. For a serious international paper that brands itself as the leading global authority on business and politics and for a paper with the biggest US staff of any London paper it was disappointing.
It was odd to find the international edition of The Times online still leading on Kenya, though there was a photo of Obama saying “follow the latest from Iowa” but without indicating the result. And this despite the fact that The Times has one of the most experienced US correspondents of them all, Gerard Baker, in Iowa. The last entry of his blog did have a rather breathless account of the result as it had appeared at 3.52am - and then all was silence.
The Independent website was still leading on their splash about the true cost of cheap chicken. The Obama story was second but although it seemed to be a 6.00am version by Leonard Doyle in Des Moines, it clearly wasn’t since it was obviously written yesterday and had no news of the result or even a hint of a result. (It was quite a good piece by the way).
The Telegraph online did an excellent job. Will Lewis can give a pat on the back to Toby Harnden and Alex Spillius in Des Moines. Jointly they produced a sharp and authoritative lead story, far better than the Beeb’s, and by 6.00am there were two separate pieces of analysis, one written by each, on where the result left the Republicans and Democrats. This was exactly the stuff that one wanted to read. There was pretty good video. And although it was the obvious way to do it, someone had thought about it in advance, made a plan and carried it off well. The story was presented online as the splash and as breaking news. It all felt highly competent.
But I guess The Guardian, by a narrow squeak, was best. Why? Suzanne Goldenberg and Ewen MacAskill’s lead story was very good, marrying the colour, the drama and the facts. And Michael Tomasky, the editor of Guardian America, produced a good commentary on the spot about the Obama campaign. There was video for those who wanted it. And I think what pipped them to the post was that their US election blog was already gathering reaction and comment from around the world.
However just in case anyone thinks we Brits couldn’t have done an even better job, I took a look at the New York Times online. There, at 6.00am, were five stories on every conceivable angle of the result, all updated within 10 minutes and each written with considerable inside knowledge. There was plenty of video and there was live blogging going on. The full results were presented on a table on the home page.
Does any of this matter much? Wait a couple of hours and there will be more to read about Iowa than anyone can reasonably want or digest. I think it matters in this one key respect: in one of the most competitive marketplaces in the world (the British press) the people who are trying hardest are the ones to watch. How you deal with an event like the Iowa result is a sign of how hard you are trying.
Add comment January 4th, 2008