To the point: Potus 2.0
The huge hype has come to an end, and America has a new president. Special broadcasts and election coverage on TV, experts and live segments from various TV studios, street interviews, celebrity sound bites, live updates on virtually every news site on the Internet, and an all-time record for Twitter and Facebook: Election night ended with 31 million tweets, as Twitter reported on its blog.
While the counts were made public via the traditional news services, the conversation on Twitter peaked at 327,452 tweets per minute (!). Shortly before his victory speech, Barack Obama announced his re-election as President of the USA on the net: His Twitter post has been retweeted around 563,000 times so far, and 2.5 million users on Facebook have liked the post - both absolute records. Because of the extremely inconvenient time for the European print media when the election results were announced, the electronic and online media triumphed.
But the Swiss print media were not idle either. Norbert Neininger, publisher and editor-in-chief of Schaffhauser Nachrichten, tweeted at 3:50 a.m.: "#US elections At five o'clock is the editorial deadline for our extra. Provided the result is known by then." Announced on social media, there was a very classic extra sheet distributed in the Schaffhausen area (see page 46). A relic from the Stone Age of the press, which perhaps met with positive acceptance for that very reason. If that's not convergence!
The Aargauer Zeitung had an amusing idea for its front page (see page 47) - without knowing the election results when it went to press. Thanks to Twitter and Facebook, it was quickly publicized outside its own readership.
I, too, could not escape the fascination of the election broadcasts. At 6:30 a.m., I went to the mailbox, took out the NZZ and Tagi, and put them on the page. Instead, I downloaded the e-paper onto my iPad and was surprised: The NZZ had the same front page as the printed edition. In the article, then a reference to the current coverage on NZZ.ch, but without a corresponding active link. The Tagi at least still managed to bring an up-to-date picture of the election winner on its app. A bit of press stone age would not have been so bad here, because in the past, at least part of the print edition had an updated alternate page. With the e-paper, that should actually be possible, too. So much for convergence.
Pierre C. Meier, Editor-in-Chief
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