Grading the election coverage

You can debate - as many of my correspondents did -- whether the election of Barack Obama was good for the country. It definitely was good for The News & Observer.

We were besieged last week with requests for extra copies of the Nov. 5 edition memorializing Obama's historic win. In response, The N&O sold 21,000 extra copies, plus front-page commemorative posters. How historic was the occasion? By comparison, The N&O sold 2,500 extra copies when President Bush was re-elected in 2004.

That "OBAMA WINS" front page was a dramatic one, and it was no accident. The news staff began planning the design two weeks before the election, and designer Jennifer Bowles had an Obama page ready to go the day before (yes, there was one for John McCain, too). It was designed with an eye toward its keepsake value, said design editor Teresa Kriegsman.

The entire Nov. 5 paper represented a special effort on the part of the staff -- 12 full pages of election coverage, from president down to local school board. It got mostly positive reaction from readers.

"I thought the coverage in today's paper was fantastic -- very comprehensive, including great work on the state and local races, and appropriate for the magnitude of the event. I watched election coverage all day and evening yesterday, and today's N&O still managed to tell me things I didn't know," Pete Rau of Durham wrote in an e-mail Wednesday.

"The N&O's coverage was perfect. I will save my newspaper. This is history," said Octavia Rainey, who lives in Southeast Raleigh.

Take away the presidential contest, and the newspaper still had a challenge to cover the rest of the races on the ballot. Think how historic it was that North Carolina elected its first female governor, Beverly Perdue, and replaced one of the nation's best-known female politicians, Sen. Elizabeth Dole, with unknown Kay Hagan. Because of the Obama dominance, their pictures barely made the front page, and the stories ran inside.

Best things about the coverage, according to my communicators:

* COMPREHENSIVE. The 12 full pages of coverage on Nov. 5 included stories on races for president, governor, Senate, Congress, N.C. Council of State (lieutenant governor, attorney general and seven other statewide offices), the General Assembly, state and local judgeships, and county commissioner and school board races in five Triangle counties.

* WELL PACKAGED: Stories with vote tally boxes and pictures organized by contests and geography in a reader-friendly design.

* OPINION: The opinion pages, for the first time in several years, had editorials and op-ed pieces commenting on the outcomes the day after the election -- that's a late-deadline tightrope-walking feat. Several readers noticed and expressed appreciation.

* NEWSOBSERVER.COM provided running results, regularly updated, beginning shortly after the polls closed. You could click on election maps and get results for every race you were interested in. There were nearly 1 million page views Wednesday, twice the normal number.

* COMPLETENESS: Even with earlier deadlines, the paper was able to report results in almost every race. The notable exception was the presidential outcome in North Carolina, because of yet-to-be counted provisional ballots.

But readers also had a few gripes about the coverage. One was that there was not enough analysis. Several readers complained that the paper didn't give them enough information on how the candidates won, or lost. "I'd have liked a little more about North Carolina being so evenly divided, maybe a look at the breakdown of who voted which way, and what effect the undetermined counties might have," said Rita Thissen, of Chapel Hill.