Earlier in the week the inaugral Brighton Future Of News Meetup was held and heralded a new feature that is now being featured on the website of local paper The Argus – a parliamentary candidate tracker. This allows users and staff from the Argus, providing they have a Google account and can operate Google Maps, to track where candidates have been in their electioneering, what they did and what they said. It also has Twitter integration, displaying tweets made by the candidates. Jo Wandsworth, web editor at the Argus explains how it came about:
I was really glad when election coverage was one of the discussion ideas, and when I heard [journalist and media trainer] Steve Bustin suggest the map, I loved it, and as soon as I had a spare couple of hours, I decided to put it together.
Here in Brighton we’ve got one of the most interesting election battles in Brighton Pavilion, where the Green Party’s Caroline Lucas has her party’s best ever chance of picking up a seat in Parliament. But it’s a very close-run thing, with strong competition from both Labour’s Nancy Platts and the Conservative’s Charlotte Vere.
Luckily for me, all three are also on Twitter, which gave me enough material to kick-start the data on the map, with very interesting results. It’s surprising how little green there is there, for instance, and the red and blue markers are already showing a clear geographical divergence. But that was the easy part – the real challenge now is actually getting voters to add their own markers.
For me, this is a perfect example of what local newspapers should be doing to cover the election – collaborating with their own community to provide their readership with a completely new take on the election. I hope that more newspapers look at the example of the Argus and use it as inspiration for the building blocks of their own election coverage.
A couple of sidenotes:
- I do realise that I haven’t done the second part of this post here. That may or may not be forthcoming but it depends on how much spare time I have.
- The second official Future Of News Meetup in London is taking place on the 25th February. I’m looking forward to it and hopefully I’ll be able to hang around for a bit longer than half an hour after it’s finished.
