Sentinel.com blog

On election night, the Santa Cruz County Supervisors race in the 5th District was a virtual tie. Bruce McPherson led by 26 votes over Eric Hammer – with 6,500 absentee votes to count. Sentinel reporter Jason Hoppin ran some numbers and made a prediction that McPherson would win by 231 votes. Turned out he won by 245.

Jason was asked to share some of his homework on how he become the Nate Silver of Santa Cruz County’s biggest political race. Here’s what he said:

Not sure if you’d categorize this one as dumb or smart, but the result worked out so we’ll call it smart. Here’s how we “called” (OK, we said the apparent eventual winner had “reasons for optimism”) an election with 26 votes separating two candidates and 6,500 absentees still to tally. Before you scoff that it’s too simple, we were off by a grand total of 14 votes.

It was actually pretty basic, with an assist from an elections office that has come to expect detailed requests from us. When the dust settled on election night, we had results by polling place, broken out into several categories, including the number of in-person ballots and results and the number of vote-by-mail ballots and results.

Deciding that the absentees to be counted would break much like those absentees already cast (instead of in-person voters, which one campaign somewhat wishfully expected), we created a spreadsheet. For each polling place we analyzed the split of already-counted absentees. Two days after the election, the county clerk was able to supply us with the raw numbers of ballots from each precinct (in many cases, I had to combine precincts to get the total number for each polling place, since several precincts often make up one polling place).

From there, we ran the numbers. Applying ratios from already-counted absentee ballots to pending absentee ballots, we came up with expected results for each polling place. Then we added those together. We also reduced both totals by 8 percent — the difference between all counted ballots within this supervisorial district and the total number of votes in this particular race (in other words, the dropoff rate).

That’s it. We predicted that when the counting was over, Candidate A would have a lead of 231 votes over Candidate B. It ended up being 245. I’m sure part of this is luck, but we had a pretty big sample size on which to run our projections. In the end it worked out. -Jason

Stories:

• McPherson’s lead widens to 245 votes
• In Santa Cruz County’s Fifth District, Eric Hammer got progressive hand up: Is toss-up also a rebuke to establishment?
• Result in Santa Cruz County’s Fifth District will take days: Eric Hammer, Bruce McPherson deadlocked
  

If you follow politics in Santa Cruz, care about the journalism business, or what’s happening with the county, you should follow @scnewsdude (aka Jason Hoppin) on twitter. Here’s a two-tweet summary of election day in Santa Cruz from Jason.

You’ll find Jason breaks almost all his significant reporting on twitter, hours before his story is written. We recommend reading both.

The iPad is becoming a bigger part of everything we do in the news world.

More people are using it to consume news. More people are using it for social sharing. More people are using it for web browsing, and if you want to show anyone photos of your kids, there’s nothing better.

More people are finding the iPad takes the place of a desktop computer, or a laptop computer. And the iPad’s productivity tools continue to get better.

When the Sentinel offered a plan for employees to buy iPads through a payroll deduction, we wound up with a stack of 26 of them that were handed out last month.

How are reporters using them?

Well, they’re learning. They’re working on typing stories into Google docs and sending them back to the desk (pro tip – work through the Google search app, rather than the browser). They’re working on photo sharing on Twitter and Instagram through the iPad. They’re exploring apps like Evernote (for note taking with multimedia) and Dragon Dictation. They’re looking at photo editing tools through Photoshop Express, video editing with iMovie.
They’re getting their own news through Flipboard and Zite.
They’re looking at Storify as a way of gathering social reaction to events.
They’re looking at AP news.
They’re checking out Cloud On (for accessing excel and Word files).

Sentinel reporters Shanna McCord and Jason Hoppin browse through app stores for iPad and iPhone and talk about productivity tools for journalists.

My advice for journalists – be curious. Imagine how your audience is getting your work and try to shorten the distance between you and the reader. Imagine how the audience of the future will receive your work, and meet them there. I think a lot of reporters are thinking they report, write, send to an editor, who sends to page designer, the story prints and somehow winds up on our website. There are a million ways for reporters and editors to improve you own brand, improve your own digital skills, improve the information you receive about your beat, and serve the audience. With regard to the iPad, it contains all the tools needed to perform your daily work in the journalism world. Consider taking a day to cover your beat using only that tool – progress on the learning curve will be worth the effort.

Make a point of seeing what’s possible for readers, and of thinking about how you can help create that experience for your own readers.

Here are a few of the apps you may find helpful:

• Twitter, a must for being informed and breaking news
• Storify – for collecting and re-sharing social media and other links
• Evernote – multimedia note taking in the cloud
• Dragon Dictation
• Photoshop Express – photo editing
• Instagram- social photo sharing
• iMovie – video editing
• AP mobile – breaking news from Associated press
• iA Writer – simple writing template
• Zite, Flipboard, Feedly – readers
• Google – if you’ve been a gmailer and fan of google’s productivity tools, use the app, where applications and services are optimized

Other suggestions: Here’s a discussion in Quora (thanks @ivanlajara): What are the best iPad apps for journalists?

We all welcome your tips.

Posted from Los Altos, California, United States.

On late notice, we invited the Santa Cruz Community Media Lab bloggers to stop by our out-of-the-way office in Scotts Valley and have a discussion about blogging with anyone from the newsroom interested in attending.

It was a cool meeting. We occupied some space on the white board. We had coffee and one of our favorite bloggers brought cookies for us all. The publisher, Michael Turpin, whose new blog will be up and running next week, stopped in.

Reporters Jason Hoppin, Shanna McCord and Vidur Malik joined us. Digital Producer Christina Gullickson organized the whole thing.

And we had a great bunch of CML bloggers:

• Jim Coffis from SLVnews.net
• Christine Candelaria from The Aums
• Elizabeth from Motherhood: A Descent Into Madness
• Mary Andersen from the SLV Chamber
• Angus McMahan from Angus-Land
• Vicki Wees from History Discussions: Santa Cruz Mountains and San Lorenzo Valley

After talking about community connections, possibilities for the CML, the Sentinel and its website, technical advice, parenting, and business models in the digital world, there was unanimous agreement that we would have more gatherings with more members of the Community Media Lab.

I like where this is going, and I have no idea where that is.

Thanks to all the 130 bloggers who are participating!
- Tom

Here’s a short collection of tweets about Thursday’s meeting:

Posted from Scotts Valley, California, United States.