What Broadcasters are Doing

What experiences in covering the previous elections have shaped how you're planning to cover this year's election?

Our goal as a news organization is always the same - to provide our listeners with the facts. You will never hear us offer an opinion on a candidate or an issue at debate in the election. You will hear us share candidates' stances on issues and discuss the various sides of issues that are up for debate in an election season. We also like to discuss how wins/losses can effect the balance of power at both the national and local levels. At the end of the day, our goal is to help news consumers determine how the results of the election may impact them on a day-to-day basis.

At WTOP, we cover the election from a holistic, cross-platform perspective. We keep the voter in mind when creating that content. We create local election guides with information on candidates and their platforms, the major local races, information on where to vote and links to other election resources. These are posted to our website. On air, listeners hear interviews with candidates in major races. We also report on the major issues on voters' minds. While we can only play clips of interviews on air, we offer these interviews in their entirety on our website. We also use our social media channels to disseminate this important information.

As 2024 election coverage is underway, how are you working to combat misinformation and report trustworthy news?

In a world where a lot of misinformation is shared from unverified sources and where that misinformation can go viral, it has become our job to debunk that as well. Factcheck stories have proven to be extremely popular on our website and we like to offer that type of content to our consumers when we can.

As a local news organization, WTOP relies on our trusted national partners to provide us with information they have gathered about national races. At the local level, we live by the motto: "First get it right, then get it first." We have journalists that cover the VA, MD and DC politics beats. They are a big part of our election coverage prep and planning, and ensuring we are asking the right questions.

What are the best practices your company is putting into place to ensure you're presenting the most up-to-date and factual information on election night, including the results and the days following?

We have worked with the Associated Press for years to bring up-to-the-minute national and local election results to our audience (on-air and online). The AP offers affiliates a portal where we can see minute-by-minute how many votes have been counted, how many precincts have reported, which candidate is leading each race and what percent of the vote they have garnered. When the AP calls a race, we call a race. We also offer results on hyper-local races. This content is curated by journalists working our election desk and looking at data from the local election boards throughout the night. As the only 24/7 local news source in the DMV, we take our job as a disseminator of this information very seriously. We find our consumers crave it as our local elections results pages are always some of our highest trafficked web pages.

One of the other important things we do is make contact with election officials in advance. This way if we have questions about races that are too close to call or any other election issue we can ask them directly and get information back in a timely manner.

In what ways are communicating you this news with your audiences?

Our goal is to communicate any verified information across our platforms - on-air, online, social media. We know how important it is to be everywhere our consumers are.

How do you see your role, and the role of broadcasting in general, in election coverage?

Our role is to serve the public. When it comes to elections or any other news event, our job is to provide the facts that our audience can use to make decisions.