Complete bedlam - but somehow it works
Behind the scenes of election night
Most journalists love election night. It’s fast-paced, exciting, late-breaking, unpredictable. You know in your heart that viewers and readers really want to know what happened, so it takes all your skills to deliver a ton of information in an understandable way.
In TV news, the key to a successful election night is preparation weeks in advance. There are few stories that require a total team effort with nearly every station employee contributing in some way. Anchors, reporters and photographers might be doing their usual thing, but advertising executives might be working the phones. Engineers who are usually soldering something back in the shop are out stringing cables at a candidate’s headquarters.
I had decades of experience, both as a reporter in the field and later as the manager who tried to plan some order into a chaotic night. I would put out plans weeks in advance and ask staff to find the holes in the plan so we could sharpen it as election day approaches.
There are a lot of elements to election night. The most important part is getting the numbers fast and getting them right. It took computer-savvy staffers to set up the returns system, and talented graphics people to make those numbers show up on screen in a clear way so viewers could see who’s up and who’s down.
The next most important part is setting up live shots from candidate headquarters so viewers can see the victory or concession speeches. On a typical newscast, there might be two or three live shots from the field. On election night, we could have eight or ten. Those candidate headquarters might be in a hotel ballroom in downtown Des Moines, or a restaurant in a small town in northwest Iowa. Each one required careful planning. How do we light the room? How do we communicate with the station? (We usually paid a lot to the phone company to install landline phones because cellphones don’t work great in a crowded room where everyone is on their phone.) The critical part is how do we get a live signal back to the station? Do we send a satellite truck? One of those microwave vans with a tall mast? In recent years, we could send live video over cellphone devices, but again, cellphones are unreliable on election night.
The last part is what happens in studio. Our staff is used to producing scripted half-hour newscasts. But election night requires hours of live television with no script. Anchors who usually read the teleprompter suddenly must ad-lib for hours on end, reading election returns off the screen, asking questions of analysts, and trying to make sense of it all for viewers. And they have to do it with producers yelling in their earpieces about what to read next. It’s not easy.
The only thing that helps staff make that transition is practice. At 3:00 pm on election day, we always did a rehearsal. That helped us find problems and correct them prior to going live later that night. We learned over the years that the more disastrous the rehearsal, the better our election night coverage would be. A smooth rehearsal could mean only one thing – a total meltdown later that night!
The normal rhythm of a newsroom goes out the window on election day. The mornings are quiet because nearly all staff members have moved to a night shift. People start drifting in around 2:00 pm for an all-staff meeting where we talk over last minute changes. It’s a little like an Army preparing for battle. Photographers charge their camera batteries. Reporters check their equipment and make a few phone calls. Engineers head out to start setting up equipment. An inevitable question from a staff member is “What’s for dinner?” Every Army runs on its stomach, so we would cater in an evening meal.
Then, the 3:00 o’clock rehearsal. The 5:00 pm and 6:00 pm newscasts gave us another chance to test all the systems. Then we wait for the polls to close, get those first numbers in, and get on the air for hours of total bedlam behind the scenes that had better look calm and organized on air.
The nerve center is the studio control room, normally a chaotic place during any newscast but on election night is chaos on steroids. The people getting the election returns might shout “We have a lead change in the Senate race!” The producer then tells the anchors in their earpieces to read new numbers from the Senate race, but the anchors are trying to concentrate on what the analyst is saying. Meantime, one of the crews in the field tells us that a candidate is coming out to concede, so the producer changes course and tells the anchors “Forget about reading the Senate numbers. Go to the Hotel Fort Des Moines for the concession speech!” The anchors smile and smoothly make the transition. And so it goes for hours on end, often beyond midnight.
For crews in the field, it can be an exhilarating night as a candidate who was down in the polls has a come-from-behind victory. Supporters are drinking and yelling and clapping. As a reporter, it’s hard to hear and harder to think but you must remain calm under pressure. The opposite holds at the headquarters of a losing candidate. The crowd files out early. A pall hangs over the room. It’s depressing.
After 100 percent of the precincts are reporting, and the last speech is made, we wrap things up and end the broadcast. High-fives around. The field crews filter back into the newsroom and start working on their stories for tomorrow’s morning newscast. Eventually, everyone ends up at a bar to unwind and trade war stories. We grab a few hours sleep and are back in the newsroom bright and early, gulping coffee and trying to figure out what it all means for the future of our state and our country.
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Dave, your column brings back a lot of good memories. I was always in charge of election coverage at the TV stations where I worked. Our preparations were almost exactly as you describe. I go back far enough that I remember using calculators, two way radios, and typewriters to cover elections. How exciting it was when we got computers and an interface with the Chyron so we no longer had to manually type in the numbers for air.
Dave, I found my adrenaline surging as I read your story. Thanks for this glimpse of how election night coverage occurs in a tv newsroom.