Building the Redbrick US Elections Hub
In less than 24 hours, a team of Redbrick journalists will get together and take on the task of covering the 2012 US Elections. From instant reactions and commentary, to interactive graphics and visualisations, the team are going all-out, and we hope you enjoy the coverage. Facilitating this team of capable journalists requires an equally capable website. One which is 'living' and allows for quick customisation when news breaks, one which encourages 'second screening' (where a reader may use a laptop, tablet or smartphone while they watch their TV), and one which is simple and easy to digest, whether you join in from the start, or later on during proceedings. During the development of our new website, Josh Holder and I wanted it to be flexible enough for hubs (also referred to as microsites) like the US Elections to be put together within just a few days. The site was built with basic elements and styles in place, so that 'modules' (such as story elements, videos etc.) could be placed onto a page quickly, then populated with content. As with most designs, it started with a drawing.
From the image above, you get a feel for how the sketch on the left translates to the design on the right. The handy web-service Placehold.it helped in producing the placeholder images. The logo below was designed to help promote the hub via social media.
To create a site which was living and would provide updates when they came in, rather than when the reader refreshes their page, the web-service Pusher has been used in our 'Latest Updates' sidebar. Pusher allows us to send live updates into a page after it has been loaded by the user, meaning that if new content comes in, we can add it to the page. These updates can be anything from tweets, quotes & headlines from articles, images, data and more. They can quickly and easily transmit short bursts of information to keep people in the loop. In addition to our liveblog (powered by ScribbleLive), this provides a way of linking to more media rich content, and we can be more selective about what takes prominence.
A hub which encourages 'second screening'
Since the release of the iPad just over two years ago, the rise in 'second screening' has been well documented.
second screening | ˈsɛk(ə)nd ˈskriːnɪŋ | The use of other screens, such as laptops, smartphones and tablets while watching TV
Second screening is changing the way people watch television. Instead of solely concentrating on one screen, viewers may follow a Twitter feed on their phone, watch interactive graphics develop on their tablet as a show is broadcast, or discover live data-feeds from a sporting even like the F1. Our US Elections hub provides just that: a way for readers, if they wish, to watch coverage from the likes of the BBC, whilst also enjoying commentary and graphics from student journalists at Redbrick. On desktop, tablet, or mobile, our US Elections hub looks great.
A hub which is simple and easy to digest
If we're to tell the story of the US Elections to the best of our ability, it has to be easy for our readers to delve in, find what they're looking for, and see what they need to know. We've built a number of different layouts into the back-end of the hub, meaning we can place focus on particular stories when needed, or remove focus when not. In the 'Latest Updates' sidebar, tweets and quotes are clearly labelled, and relative dates are used to indicate how long ago an article was written in minutes, hours or days, making it easy to see how recent an article is.
I'm a geographer at heart, and with something like the US Elections, location and spatial scale mean everything. GIS (Geographical Information Systems) are the perfect tool for creating interactive mapping, and tools like Leaflet and the Open Data movement help to make this possible on the web.
The above map will feature on our US Elections homepage, and be updated throughout Tuesday night - as results for states come in, they will be coloured to represent that. By the end of the night, we should get a better understanding of how the United States has voted. Our live-coverage starts at 10pm tonight on www.redbrick.me/us.
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