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How public radio stations in California collaborated to cover the election
In March, I started a new role as project manager of elections overseeing a first-time collaboration with four public media organizations: KPCC in Los Angeles, KQED in San Francisco, Capital Public Radio in Sacramento and KPBS in San Diego. We called it California Counts; collectively, we set out to boost civic engagement while reporting on election issues that matter to Californians.
It wasn’t easy herding more than 20 journalists among from newsrooms during this crazy election season. Naturally, I learned a lot. Here are a handful of problems and solutions we encountered along the way.
Challenge: We have a super-popular voter guide; how do we use it to provide better coverage?
We teamed up with MapLight and The League of Women Voters Education Fund of California on Voter’s Edge, a non-partisan voter guide. Users could type in their address and find their local ballot, study the candidates/measures and then save their choices. The guide saw nearly 5 million unique page views among our four stations leading up to the election.