Case study: 2024 elections
2024 elections
For the 2024 election cycle, I lead the creation of two of Hearst Newspaper’s two most important subscription-based offerings: The voter guides and live results pages. In this role, I did everything from determining strategy, creating mockups, managing developers, and creating open lines of communication with newsrooms and our product team about feature requests and production requirements.
Voter guides
As is the case for many local news outlets, Voter Guides at Hearst Newspapers are a benchmark initiative. They bring audiences in at scale and convert them to paying subscribers at an exceptionally high rate. Given this track record of success in years past, I led a team of two developers in completely rebuilding and redesigning our guides for 2024. This resulted in improved page performance, as well as a better user experience and greater content flexibility for our newsrooms.
I led a team that partnered with the Albany Times Union, Hearst Connecticut Media, the Houston Chronicle, the San Antonio Express-News, the San Francisco Chronicle and a collection of community newspapers in Texas, Michigan and Illinois to launch 23 voter guides, many with corresponding endorsement pages.
New features that we implemented include:
An address lookup so readers can easily filter out races they won’t be voting on.
Easier, more intuitive internal page navigation.
A stacked, mobile-friendly layout with the ability to expand and read more about each candidate or ballot measure, which allows reporters to go more in-depth than in previous versions of the guides.
A robust recirculation module at the top to easily link to more elections-related content.
A set of unique illustrations with related backgrounds and multiple color palettes, allowing each market to customize the look and feel of their guides, while maintaining a common visual style.
SEO improvements and greater control over the paywall and metadata on the endorsements pages.
A save feature on the guides, which allows subscribers to save candidates they might want to vote for and print, email or copy their selections and/or a list of editorial board endorsements to bring with them to the ballot box.
The saved selections feature – which essentially lets users create their own ballot – is at the heart of an experiment we rolled out for the general election guides. This experiment is twofold:
Offer known users (subscribers and registered users) a premium experience with built-in personalization. If you enter an address or make candidate selections, those preferences will be saved the next time you come back to the page, even if it’s on another device — as long as you’re logged in.
Use the promise of a premium feature to capture emails from unknown users. Reg wall a high-value feature – the ballot selections – instead of the entire page, with the goal of capturing new emails without affecting an already successful conversion program.
Live results pages
Over the course of a year, I led a team of four front-end and back-end developers to create a robust set of live results pages for the primaries and general election. In November, Hearst Newspapers published more than 46 live results pages and 180 embeddable results tables and graphics, with data from more than 20 county-level scrapers as well as AP results underpinning the entire effort. You can see a selection of these pages below.