On Wednesday 4 November, the Guardian recorded its highest-ever digital traffic, reaching more than 190 million page views and 52.9m unique browsers worldwide in 24 hours – exceeding all previous traffic records by an enormous margin. Our live results tracker – a collaborative project from the Guardian’s newsroom, visual journalism, designers and engineering teams – has received over 94 million page views so far since launch, and continues to draw in readers. Here, the team behind it explain why visual journalism is so critical to what we do.
How did the results tracker come about?
We started talking to the US office about this in October 2019, before the primaries. We aim to provide live results for most major elections and we knew the whole world would be watching this one. The live results page for the 2016 US election had been a phenomenal success.
We followed a six-month project plan while continuing to cover other major visual stories, most importantly the Covid-19 crisis. Towards the end of the summer, we gradually dedicated more resources exclusively to the election, staying in close contact with US editors throughout.
Why was it such an important part of our election coverage?
Any serious news organisation needs to be able to keep its readers up to date with election results – especially for a huge event like the US election. However, we also wanted the page to have a narrative, and to provide context for our readers about the election.
We included information on the page about the key states to watch and the history of how each had voted in the past. As we launched it several hours before any results came through, we were pleased to see it received more than 3m page views in that time. Attention time on the page showed that people appreciated the extra context.
We updated the key states section as the results came in, and also added extra components to reflect the news. For example, when Trump claimed victory the next day we added a clear warning that the election was not over, and a table to show where votes were still being counted.
All of these editorial decisions added value to the page for our readers, making it an important page to return to as the count continued.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
