John King was phoning from Maine, but his most important calls won’t take place until Tuesday night.When King takes up his regular position at CNN’s “Magic Wall” during Election Night coverage, he will do so with a new layer of digital bell s and whistles at his command. He has a floating “Key Race Leaderboard” that shows how the closest races are tracking in real time. And he will be able to show viewers whether costs of gas, rent and groceries have gone up or down in every county and precinct, so viewers can see whether rising costs appear to play a role in how voters from each party cast ballots.
The system was originally designed to help Pentagon analysts utilize a touch-sensitive screen to map out their work in real time. Such technology isn’t just there to dazzle the eye. For the nation’s big TV-news networks, the feature has become increasingly critical to business as well.
Viewers have long been accustomed to seeing King and others such as Fox News’ Bill Hemmer and NBC News’ Steve Kornacki manipulate colorful screens on set and rattle off stats and data. Indeed, the element has become so de rigueur that none of the networks can envision an Election Night telecast without it. The anchors might spotlight a specific viewer’s home county or state, and the visuals make the process of distilling numbers, percentages and exit polls much easier.
At MS NOW, Ali Velshi works the board. Ed O’Keefe keeps up on stats for CBS News and Rachel Scott and Rick Klein oversee the task for ABC News. CNN also has Harry Enten and Phill Mattingly on tap.
Now, these correspondents stand increasingly at the center of new products and content presentations the networks hope keep viewers focused on their screens, and not someone else’s. NBC News is counting on Kornacki not only to charm TV viewers with his data insights, but to entice digital followers with a stand-alone “Kornacki-cam.” So important is Kornacki’s presence to both program, that NBC is tapping new technology that will let the correspondent stay in the NBC News TV studio even as he talks directly to the digital crowd by blocking his voice from the linear audio feed. It’s crucial, he says for NBC News anchors like Savannah Guthrie and Tom Llamas “to instantly interact” with Kornacki during the night.
Meanwhile, MS NOW will stream a YouTube feed giving its viewers a look at Velshi, and is running a contest to win one of his signature vests. This year, says the anchor, his data will be used to create a “brilliant graphic we can cast out on to the studio floor” that lets viewers “watch the vote count come in to the counties that matter. Our audience will be able to see where the votes are coming from and why or why not we have called a particular state.” ABC News will introduce a new feature called “Vote Shift” that examines how voters in each country may have changed their attitudes since 2024.
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