HOW WE COVERED THE NOVEMBER 5, 1968, GENERAL ELECTIONS Written July 15, 1969 • • • • •   Having intended to write this summary for over eight months now, I'm finally getting around to actually doing it.  The purpose is to give those WOBC staff members who will be running the show in 1972 some idea of what has been done in the past, so that they can learn from our experience and mistakes. Our philosophy in covering the elections was as follows:  If our listeners really wanted to get the best possible coverage of the national races, they would watch television or listen to network radio.  WOBC can't compete with the nets, who have better reporters and more information.  So, unless we merely wanted to cover the elections for our own amusement, we would need to try to give our listeners something which they couldn't get elsewhere. We thought of two such things we could give them. One was concise capsule reports inserted into our regular programming, designed so that listeners could study during the classical music shows (as we assumed they always did) and yet stay up-to-date on the presidential race and other important returns. The other was local election results and opinions:  the outcome of the Oberlin school levy, the races involving two local men running for Congress and the state legislature, and opinions on the national races from government professors, Young Republican and Young Democrat leaders, and other local persons.  We advertised these two points heavily on the air and in Newscope. About 30 people — a majority of our news staff — volunteered to help in covering the elections.  The ones with most experience got the best jobs, of course.  We set up three shifts, about five hours long, and staffed them as follows: Each shift had a co-ordinator to oversee the entire operation, an on-the-air reporter concentrating on the presidential race in the various states, and another on-the-air reporter covering the gubernatorial and congressional races for the entire country. For the first shift (election night before midnight) we also had an on-the-air reporter for the local elections, a pair of reporters at the county Board of Elections in Elyria who sent in phone reports to be recorded and broadcast, a couple of people to go to the various polling places in Oberlin to get the local results (a car was essential), an interviewer with a portable tape recorder, another interviewer with a live mike in Wilder Main Lounge, and a handful of people we called data-gatherers. If I remember correctly, another set of data-gatherers served on the midnight-to-early-morning shift.  The past-midnight shifts also required sufficient disc jockeys to keep the records spinning between reports. We had originally planned to post UPI teletype copy on a large bulletin board in Wilder Main Lounge, two floors below the WOBC studios, with the idea that students would be gathering there to watch the returns come in on television.  (In 1964 the entire teletype machine had been moved down to the Main Lounge along with the WOBC reporters, who kept a continuous report going throughout the evening from this ad-hoc open "newsroom.") Oberlin students were a bit apathetic about the 1968 elections, though, since none of the candidates (Nixon, Humphrey, Wallace) were to the average student's liking.  As a result, Wilder Main was about as empty as it is on any other night, and we soon abandoned the UPI-posting idea.  (We would have had problems with it, anyway.  We had managed to find some paper for the teletype machine which produced a normal copy plus two carbon copies, with the idea that the first carbon could be used by our on-the-air men and the original taken downstairs, but the paper got jammed up and we decided to go back to the old reliable single-copy paper.) Nevertheless, we did have our interviewer with his live mike downstairs, to give us two or three interviews during the course of the evening.  Having him "remote" was desirable since it kept him and his interviewee out from under foot at the studios, and besides the engineering was more exciting that way. The other interviewer with the tape recorder would make a short interview, bring the 5" reel (recorded at 7½ ips) back to the station to be used at our convenience, and immediately go back out again to get another interview. For the data-gatherers, we had not only the UPI machine; we also had two portable television sets.  We had been advised by the 1964 veterans that the UPI would be inadequate, so we set a person in front of each TV and had them copy down all the facts and figures they could (one from NBC, the other from CBS). Here we ran into one of the snags in the operation.  The data gathered from TV was inconsistent in format:  Humphrey might be leading in one state 65% to 30%, trailing in another by 30,000 votes, and leading in a third by a vote of 103,492 to Nixon's 97,215 and Wallace's 30,997. The presidential on-the-air reporter tried to tell the data-gatherers which form he wanted.  But as soon as he sent out the word, the data-gatherers would switch assignments and another would sit down in front of the TV, unindoctrinated.  The co-ordinator wasn't able to keep a sufficiently close watch over this because other things were going on at the same time. Also, once the information had been copied down there was a problem of organizing it.  We had a blackboard in Studio A with the name of every state on it, with the intent that vote totals would be posted on it and kept up-to-date.  But the inconsistency problem in the data again showed up.  No one wanted the job of marking on the blackboard.  And how do you decide whether to credit Nixon with Indiana if CBS says he has carried it while NBC says it's too close to call and UPI doesn't say anything? My recommendation here would be to forget about gathering data from television.  UPI is slower by only about 20 minutes, I would estimate, and since the data is printed and standardized, the above-mentioned problems would not show up.  It's the same sort of data that the networks have anyway (except for the precincts used for making projections), since a national service collects the vote totals for all wire services and broadcasters and gives them to them as soon as they're collected.  The quantity of data which comes over UPI is sufficient to keep a capsule-type operation going, though it probably would be inadequate if we were on the air continuously with election news. A minor problem arose in connection with local data-gathering.  Some of the returns which the boys in Elyria reported were identical with the returns which the local reporter had just read over the air, so we got a redundancy.  Also, local data-gathering was disappointingly slow.  In future years, a concerted effort by the news department's best investigator should be made to find out as soon as possible what the official results are.  This is one of the advantages of WOBC which we advertise, after all. The other advantage is that we don't bore our listeners with continuous coverage, but rather let them study for the greater part of each hour.  Well, that didn't quite work out that way in 1968, either.  At least not before about one o'clock in the morning, at which point I went to bed.  Below are three columns:  our normal program scheduling for Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning as of November 1968, the plan we had for inserting election reports into this normal schedule, and what (to the best of my memory) actually happened.  "Dinner Date" is easy-listening pop music; "Night Patrol" and "Sunrise!" are rock music. NORMAL PLANNED ACTUAL 5:30 pm NEWS 5:30 pm NEWS with early election returns 5:30 pm NEWS with early election returns 5:45 pm DINNER DATE 5:45 pm DINNER DATE 5:45 pm DINNER DATE 7:25 pm NEWS 7:25 pm NEWS with later returns 7:25 pm NEWS without any special returns to speak of 7:30 pm EVENING CONCERT 7:30 pm EVENING CONCERT 7:30 pm EVENING CONCERT begins ` ` 7:50 pm RETURNS interrupting between two classical pieces ` ` 8:00 pm EVENING CONCERT resumes 8:55 pm NEWS 8:55 pm RETURNS 8:55 pm RETURNS 9:00 pm CHAMBER MUSIC 9:05 pm CHAMBER MUSIC 9:10 pm CHAMBER MUSIC ` 9:55 pm RETURNS 10:00 pm RETURNS 10:00 pm MUSIC OF THE 20TH CENTURY (classical) 10:05 pm MUSIC OF THE 20TH CENTURY 10:30 pm MUSIC OF THE 20TH CENTURY  with one work omitted 11:00 pm NEWS 11:00 pm RETURNS 11:00 pm RETURNS 11:15 pm EDUCATIONAL ` ` 11:30 pm FOLK MUSIC `  ` 12:30 am NIGHT PATROL 11:30 pm NIGHT PATROL 11:40 pm NIGHT PATROL 2:00 am SIGN OFF interrupted when necessary for returns interrupted when necessary for returns 7:00 am  SUNRISE! 7:00 am SUNRISE! 7:00 am SUNRISE! ` interrupted when necessary for returns interrupted when necessary for returns 9:00 am SIGN OFF 10:30 am SIGN OFF In other words, planned 10-minute reports were running as long as half an hour.  This was mostly due to the announcers' not editing down their material to the essentials.  Not many people were interested in the vote count in North Dakota, but it was dutifully reported in full detail when a simple "Humphrey is leading at the moment in Minnesota and in North and South Dakota" would have been sufficient.  Predictably, the interviews and remote reports from Elyria had a tendency to be slightly long, too. Around sign-off time Wednesday morning, a comprehensive 20-minute taped report of all results of all races was prepared.  This was broadcast a couple of times that afternoon.  I wondered afterward about the desirability of doing this.  It got a bit boring after the first five minutes or so; it would seem that anyone who wanted to know who was elected governor of New Mexico could have bought a newspaper rather than listening to WOBC; and it was evident from the announcer's voice on the tape that he was dead tired. Some other miscellaneous items might be mentioned.  Each report began with a special news theme containing the words, "From the newsrooms of WOBC, here is another election special report"; this had been recorded in advance on a cartridge.  The three on-the-air reporters were seated in Studio A (the presidential reporter and the congressional-gubernatorial reporter near each other and the local reporter a little distance away) with as many tables and music stands and the like as we could dig up to hold their papers and notes; each had a separate mic.  The on-the-air reporters had done their homework in advance, of course, from reading the New York Times and from other sources, so that they had a good idea of who was running and what their chances were. And that's about it.  To those who will be reading this with an eye to producing their own WOBC election coverage:  good luck, and have fun!   To return to "Broadcaster," click here.