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Letter from the Editor Dear Reader,
Some things will never change for journalists on election night – slow-arriving results, little sleep, and room-temperature pizza in the wee hours of the morning.
But in so many ways, the 2020 presidential election was very different. Record voting, much of it absentee; questions of polling integrity; and, like everything else about 2020, the overarching effects of COVID.
“It’s been an election unlike any other,” said MLive.com reporter Brian McVicar, who somehow managed to capture absolute fact and epic understatement in one short sentence.
McVicar, who works out of Grand Rapids, and colleagues Lindsay Moore (Kalamazoo) and Ryan Stanton (Ann Arbor) joined me Wednesday morning on MLive’s Behind the Headlines podcast to talk about how they did the critical work of keeping you informed in a very challenging set of circumstances.
“I feel like November 3, 2020, has been on my mind for four years,” said Moore. “We knew it was going to be a long one and a big one. We didn't know it was going to be in a pandemic.”
The pandemic complicated what already was shaping up to be an election with record turnout. Not only for voters, but for reporters and politicians. Election night traditionally involves reporters crisscrossing town, interviewing candidates and popping into a county clerk’s office.
“This was the first election in 12 years of covering Ann Arbor elections where I wasn't bouncing around a whole bunch of different election night watch parties,” Stanton said. “I was mostly based at home on my computer.”
Moore said she felt “isolated not to be in a newsroom” as she did her reporting from home.
“It was weird to have friends that are not journalists texting me about presidential results and I just kept having to say, ‘You know, I’m in reporter mode. I'm stressed as a reporter right now, I'll be stressed as a citizen tomorrow, Thursday and Friday.’”
The reporters said remote coverage is easier and more efficient than it has been in the past, due to improvements in online posting of results by election officials. But our increasingly remote lives made it more essential for our reporters to work to get the human touch with candidates and poll workers.
“Even though we are in this new world of doing a lot of Zoom and electronic communication, trying to pick up that phone and hear a voice on the other end is important,” McVicar said.
And a lot of that work, as Moore said, is done ahead of time. “As reporters, a lot of our responsibility on election night is to already have a relationship with our clerks. Especially in a pandemic setting, where so much is virtual, that was key.”
There were the normal election-night obstacles, such as vote tabulations running slow due to the massive number of mail-in ballots. For our reporters, who need to write about results from a broad ballot in their local communities, that means a long next day.
But there also were silver linings to this election-like-no-other. Even though we weren’t all grouped in a brightly lit office into the wee hours, we still were together virtually.
“We were all at our computers, so we were all chatting all night about things as they came in,” Stanton said. “There was a lot more collaboration in that regard.”
And while Moore said a lot of the night involved “refreshing, refreshing, refreshing” her computer for results, she found a way to be productive.
“The one benefit of being at home is I could stress bake,” she said. “I made a big batch of brownies because I just needed something to do while waiting for these absentees to come in. So, there are pluses and minuses.”
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🎧 To listen to this week's episode of the podcast, click here. To hear all the stories behind the stories, click here and subscribe to our Behind the Headlines podcast.
Editor's note: I value your feedback to my columns, story tips and your suggestions on how to improve our coverage. Let me know how MLive helps you, and how we can do better. Please feel free to reach out by emailing me at editor@mlive.com.
John Hiner Executive Editor Vice President of Content Mlive Media Group
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