We worked closely with Cox Media Group during the US mid-term elections to make sure that they could achieve their most ‘ambitious ePaper plans’ to date and provide continued coverage throughout the election process. Our support team, who work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, worked closely with the team at Cox Media Group to ensure that their curated election content was processed to meet strict deadlines. Mark Waligore, Senior Director and Managing Editor at Cox Media Group explains more below…
This year’s midterm elections, without a doubt, represented one of the biggest stories of the year. The timing of the results certainly added to the challenges. At Cox Media Group, our Ohio and Atlanta properties covered races that were closely watched across the country. Working with PageSuite, we were able to provide complete election results, super-serve our readers with up-to-date information, and set records in terms of visits and page views on our digital replicas.
Our special ePaper coverage began at 2:30 p.m. on Election Day, when we produced a bonus edition for Ohio and Atlanta aimed at capturing the news of the day. In Georgia, our early stories focused on troubles at polling sites, an issue that would plague results throughout the night. Because we viewed this special afternoon edition as a way to help empower those who hadn’t yet cast ballots, this section also served as a voter’s guide, reminding voters, for instance, of where the candidates stood on key issues.
At 5 a.m. Wednesday morning, our Ohio newspapers in Dayton, Hamilton and Springfield published special ePaper editions that contained up-to-date results from the night before. Had it not been for the ePaper and the support we received from PageSuite, we never would have been able to present this information in a curated newspaper format.
As we did in Ohio, Atlanta also produced a special 5 a.m. ePaper on the gubernatorial race, which was still too close to call. We originally envisioned outputting this section at 2 a.m., then aimed for 3 a.m. But when the presumptive winner finally addressed his supporters at 2:36 in the morning, our last deadline moved to 3:15 a.m. Once again, PageSuite was more than accommodating in allowing us to use every possible minute to reflect the latest news. Thanks to the quick turnaround time by PageSuite, our readers never missed a beat.
Those morning editions were followed by a noon update and a 5 p.m. edition.
Our work – coupled with an aggressive email campaign – help push the ePaper to new records, and in the end, our newsrooms were very proud of the products we produced. This was one of our most ambitious ePaper plans ever, and we couldn’t have pulled it off without the support and cooperation of PageSuite.
We were delighted to have worked with Cox Media Group to fulfil this project and look forward to working with them on similar projects in the future.