New York Times creates electronic dashboard

By: Allison McNeal

The presidential election created a wave of new milestones, including a new interactive technology for journalists.

The New York Times recently impemented a new API, which "gives users and third-party developers access to presidential campaign finance data from the Federal Election Commission collected by the paper".

This new API would also allow for detailed and interactive mapping.

One concept that Aron Pilhofer, editor of newsroom interactive technologies at the New York Times, expected to work the best during the election was the election dashboard.

"The idea was to create a smallish, sort of standalone page that you could pull up on your PC or on your iPhone and see the entire state of play without having to flip around network-to-network or Web site-to-Web site," he said.

The dashboard showed the most current results and also allowed a state-by-state breakdown.

This technology also allowed individuals to see what other competitng stations, such as CBS, NBC, ABC, the Associated Press, FOX and CNN, were reporting about the status of the election.

According to Pilhofer, this dashboard was a complete success.

The technology that these journalists used encorporated video, multimedia, graphics, and reporting that added an interactive approach.

Even though NYTimes.com used different strategies to showcase the election, this site still has large competition.

"We'll never be able to keep up with television or even larger Web sites like CNN in terms of speed, but we can be the first place people look when they want to know why something happened the way it did," Pilhofer said. "Our entire package was designed with that in mind: you may go somewhere else for the breaking news, but you'll come to us for the analysis. I think it's really our sweet spot."

After all the success with the election database, this newspaper has plans to start up a campaign finance API, with complete congressional roll call votes.

With the increase in technology, other newspapers have moved toward more interactive journalism.

Organizations like CNN had a similar election page where an individual could click on a state and see the results of each city and county.

As technology is increasing, does that mean that journalists can keep the world updated more efficiently and possibly allow for higher voter turnout?

Even though different forms of multimedia like videos and maps are being widely used by journalists, voters and individuals will have to give online newspapers positive or negative feedback about new technologies that can be used.