A group of organizations led by the Knight Foundation have launched an ambitious nationwide effort to equip news organizations with tools and services to cover the 2024 elections in their communities.
The Knight Election Hub, launched with support from Newspack, OpenNews, MuckRock and Hearken and others, provides free or reduced-price resources to U.S. newsrooms covering the 2024 elections at the federal, state, and local levels.
Covering this election will be a huge undertaking. They’re joined in the effort by the Center for Journalism & Democracy, the Institute for Nonprofit News, The Elections Group, and, LION Publishers to build a network of organizations supporting newsrooms at this unprecedented moment in American history.
The Election Hub resources will help you give your audiences the information they need to cast informed votes, have confidence in the election process and results, and understand the role newsrooms play in providing reliable civic information.
The problem
Local newsrooms informing and connecting with communities no longer have access to the services they once took for granted. Small newsrooms are often so busy that editors don’t even know about all the resources available to address their communities’ hardest questions.
As an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Newspack, I’ve been working with the foundation for the past few months to catalog the needs that news organizations have in the runup to the 2024 election, identify potential resources, and ensure that they can be made available at an affordable price.
The solution
The Election Hub is the result of that work.
We are building a collection of almost 100 selected products and services that will help you cover the election better than you thought possible. Many services are already freely available to newsrooms. For the ones that cost money, the Knight Foundation is picking up the check.
The Knight Foundation will add services throughout the summer. You can get access today if your newsroom meets the eligibility criteria explained below.
The resources are available to any qualified newsroom, regardless of their CMS. But the Newspack team is particularly focusing its efforts to ensure that all its U.S. publishers can easily take advantage of the Hub.
Here are some of the details:
Election results coverage
Over the past few weeks we asked Newspack publishers to fill out a survey about election coverage. More than 100 publishers responded. Almost 85% said they plan to cover the election this year. Just under a third said they plan to carry live results on election night — and that number more than doubled if the costs of doing so were reduced or eliminated.
The good news is that a few months ago, the Institute for Nonprofit News announced its members would get free election-result maps and graphics from the Associated Press. For newsrooms who can’t take advantage of that announcement — because they’re not INN members or because they need to cover races the AP doesn’t track — the Knight Election Hub is providing election-night results from Decision Desk HQ, which provided similar results to Newspack newsrooms in the past. A great example is Colorado Sun’s election night results page.
Newspack is working with AP and Decision Desk HQ to understand how these embeddable results will work and how we can support publishers.
If you’re just getting started covering elections, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. Elections in the United States are as complicated as they are consequential. There are a lot of things to think about when planning coverage. There’s no better place to start that process than reading the Elections Group’s new guide, “Covering Elections and Voting in 2024,” written by Pam Fessler, former elections and voting reporter at NPR News.
Fessler is also teaching a course on covering elections as part of the Poynter Institute’s Beat Academy, on July 11. Use promo code 24BAKnight100 for a discount.
Voter guides
Guides to help readers understand the voting process and what’s on their ballot can be a critical public service, not to mention a great way to draw new readers to your website and email newsletters.
The Knight Election Hub is providing resources for newsrooms building their own voter guides. One of the most important of these is Govpack, a WordPress plugin that makes creating voter guides in WordPress and Newspack easy. Thanks to a separate grant from the Knight Foundation, Govpack is being relaunched and updated this year. In addition to the improvements under the hood, Erica Peterson from Mountain State Spotlight will be working with newsrooms to help think about and build their voter guides. Here’s an example of a voter guide she built during West Virginia’s recent primary.
Data for voter guides can be hard to track down, so the Election Hub is providing information from Ballotpedia, which gathers candidate biographical data for candidates in thousands of races across the country.
If you’re thinking about doing a voter guide or you’ve decided to do one and are trying to get your bearings, a great place to start is News Revenue Hub’s new Guide to Voter Guides.
Uptime support
Election night can be the most popular day of the year on a news website. While the communities Newspack publishers serve are complex and diverse, election night is often a time when most people in U.S. cities and states are looking for answers to the same questions, such as, “Who will represent me?” and, “What were the results of the ballot measures?”
The support and engineering teams at Newspack have developed a robust procedure to make sure our publisher’s websites are able to handle any increased traffic.
Who is eligible?
Newsrooms in the United States that:
- Are substantially engaged in original news gathering and publishing for a place-based audience.
- Are clearly non-partisan and do not regularly publish work that would cause a reasonable person to doubt their ability to report the news fairly.
- Have a published ethics policy.
- Are a nonprofit newsroom of any size or are a for-profit newsroom under $5 million in revenue (parent company/subsidiaries included).
If you meet those requirements, all you need is a newsroom MuckRock account. If you don’t have an account, create a free one right here.
Get in touch
This is a brief intro to what’s available on the Knight Election Hub and what Newspack is working on for publishers. Watch for more announcements.
In the meantime, don’t hesitate to contact me in the Newspack Community Slack channel if you’re a publisher. If you aren’t a Newspack publisher, please reach out on LinkedIn.
Scott Klein is a Knight Foundation Entrepreneur in Residence with Newspack.
