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Broadcasters busy with online tie-ins for election
DAVID BAUDER - The Associated Press

05:40:05PM (ET) Monday,November 1,2010.

NEW YORK (AP) — After losing viewers to cable news networks on recent election nights, television's biggest broadcasters are fighting back hard for the midterm contest.

ABC, CBS and PBS will each stream part of their election-night coverage on the Web on Tuesday, and NBC and ABC plan six hours of results lasting into early Wednesday morning. The networks will involve some of the biggest and most popular websites — Google, Facebook, YouTube and Yahoo! — in delivering their versions of the news.

Their moves are in marked contrast to recent big political nights, when network producers had to fight for limited time while looking jealously at CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC, and their abilities to stay on stories 24 hours a day.

"It's a full-time effort to reach as many people in as many places as possible and still have the big event on television at 9:30," said Jon Banner, executive producer of ABC's "World News" and in charge of ABC's special events coverage.

ABC will air election coverage from 9:30 p.m. to 11 p.m. ET in prime time, anchored by Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos. From 8 p.m. to 9:30 p.m., the two anchors will stream a live program on ABC's website, on Facebook and the ABC News iPad application.

A separate ABC Web-only newscast, anchored by John Berman and Claire Shipman, will be streamed on Hulu, mobile platforms and Yahoo! beginning at 7 p.m.

ABC and CBS, in particular, have moved aggressively toward the Web because, unlike NBC, they don't have a cable outlet for their reporting. It's an effort likely to continue.

NBC comes on the air for two hours, starting at 9 p.m. ET, for a broadcast anchored by Brian Williams. His predecessor as anchor, Tom Brokaw, and "Meet the Press" moderator David Gregory, will join him. After a local news break, the NBC News team will be on the air for four hours after that.

"We're up late because that's when the story is going to fully unfold," Lukasiewicz said.

NBC's live election coverage will be embedded on Twitter, allowing computer owners to watch it at home or send copies of videos to their friends online.

PBS will use the Web, too, simulcasting its one-hour television special with Jim Lehrer on the Web at 11 p.m. Lehrer will do a one-hour webcast before going on television. On its website, PBS said it was doing a "social media stream," highlighting comments made by people on Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.

Fox News Channel and MSNBC are also planning coverage sure to please the ideological camps that both networks attract.

The experiments going on with the broadcast networks, however, are important moments in determining the future of their election night telecasts and for the operations of their news divisions as a whole.

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