How did you find out that Barack Obama was elected president? Were you watching the CNN coverage, with its freaky holograms? Were you surfing various news sites on the Internet, looking to see who would break the news first? Or perhaps you got the news from a friend’s status update on Facebook or Twitter.
Not surprisingly, Akamai’s Net Usage Index: News, which is a real-time monitoring of the impact of current events on online media consumption at major news sites, reported the highest-ever traffic on Election Day, with 8,572,042 visitors per minute at around 8 p.m. local time.
ZDNet reported that Facebook had a 20% increase in traffic (measured by page views) over the previous Tuesday’s traffic, with more than 5.4 million people clicking the “I Voted” button. According to the Twitter blog, Twitter updates on Election Day increased a whopping 46 percent over the Tuesday before.
I got the news of Obama’s victory in a very old-fashioned way: the radio. I was driving to a friend’s Election Day party when NPR aired John McCain’s concession speech.
How did you find out?
I spent a couple hours toggling between CNN and MSNBC, while reloading NYT and Google News election channel on my MacBook.
So, how did I hear first? From Jon Stewart right after I flipped to Comedy Central for a break. I reloaded Google, saw AP had called it, and posted a tweet about it. So, heard it first from the fake news guy…
Ditto Brook. I find it ironic that after watching The Daily Show for so many years as an antidote for political depression, I hear the biggest news from Jon Stewart first (then toggle back to CNN).
According to Nielsen the election boosted ratings all over: websites, TV, newspapers, etc. I don’t think there was a winning medium, but what was clear is that people multi-tasked and were interacting with multiple mediums back and forward.
We have analogue, rabbit ears, 6 channel TV. So, we watched NPR TV, they announced everybody’s predictions.
In addition, I was scanning web pages on my laptop: NYT, CNN, CBS. They all were posting electoral votes based on differing criteria. I followed the local election returns by viewing Seattle Times and Tacoma News Tribune. They both called the governors lead at 4%, but with exactly opposite candidate in the lead (!?).
I was so totally plugged in and over-saturated — switching tv channels from NBC, CNN and Comedy Central and toggling back-n-forth with CNN, MSNBC, ABC News, Slog (The Stranger’s blog), twitter online — I honestly can’t remember what channel/website I was on – maybe CNN?
I found out from friends. We were in a prayer meeting and then friends called in announced the winner.
through a fuzzy PBS channel and texts. our cable went out precisely five minutes before obama was declared the president elect, and came back on about 30 minutes after his speech. oh broadstripe :/
I was near UW campus at the time, the noise around got a little more frequent and louder over an hour, until a really loud cheer followed by screams. I guess the same happened online.
I found out through CNN in Spanish and confirmed it on Twitter followed by my neighbors screams!
On Fivethirtyeight.com. Before it happened.