December 2000, Vol. 11, No. 12

Re: counting votes

Politicians may not know how, but newspapers automate elections

When you're the computer jockey in a newsroom, there are occasions when your status moves up a notch or two. The first is when you resurrect a fallen system. The second is on election night.

Printing all those election results in a daily newspaper was -- even within my multidecade career -- once a nightmare. I remember the congressional elections of 1978, when as a boy copy editor, I sat in front of a computer terminal all night typing in new results for races in all the other 49 states (some other druid was doing the California numbers).

But as technology improved, the process got easier (or sometimes harder -- in my infinite wisdom in 1982, we used a brand-new front-end system that was in testing to process some election results because I thought it would be easier -- I was wrong).

Over the years, the California Secretary of State’s office provided better and better digital feeds that made it easier and faster to typeset and put results into the paper. Following one meeting of the news media and the state programmers in Sacramento, Wayne Parrack of the Los Angeles Times (who recently retired -- see Hellbox) and I were sitting in a pub across the street from the Secretary of State’s office. Out the window, we watched in awe as the sole programmer for this project got onto a motorcycle and roared away. "My ability to print election returns is dependent upon that guy not getting hit by a car," said Parrack. We advocated that the programmer get other transportation, but he demurred (he also didn't get hit).

But nothing California’s election officials ever did was as entertaining as recent activities in Florida. Whether to count ballots or not, whether to count dimpled (or "pregnant") chads or not ... hell, these people are using punch-card technology -- the same stuff I used to fail a computer programming class in college in 1974.

Newspapers know how to count votes. To prove this, I asked Neil Lewis, who is a systems analyst at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC), to tell us about the election results applications he wrote, which will be used not only by the AJC, but other Cox newspapers as well.

Once again, the wonders of AppleScript are hailed (see The Cole Papers, October 1997). Though there are other environments that would have also worked, AppleScript is a language even mere mortals can master.

Some of Lewis' development hinged on working with colleagues from other Cox papers and that happened through the wide area network that Cox has developed. Bandwidth is getting to be an important issue for newspapers -- whether completely in the multimedia revolution or not -- and so I dispatched Copy Editor Aimee Beck to find out more about what papers are doing to increase the amount of data they can exchange.

And, of course, AppleScript comes from the same people who brought us OS X -- the next-generation operating system for Macintosh computers. I have been reviewing a lot of the responses to the public beta of OS X that Apple released a few months back and have even fired up a computer or two that were running the operating system. I've wrapped my own observations along with those from around the world to give you a pretty good handle on what OS X does -- and doesn't -- do.

Finishing up our issue is a look at the long-term preservation of the physical news archive. In other words, can we easily take clips and microfilms and turn them into digital, searchable files? Writer Kellie K. Speed talks with a number of the industry’s leading experts as well as a couple of papers that are trying out new technologies to achieve just that goal.

All of which is to say that newspapers can handle vote results -- gather, print and archive, no matter on a new system or old. All we need are those results.

Holiday cheer desk: Another winter solstice is upon us, causing us to remember that it was 11 years ago this month that we got the first one of these newsletters out the door.

We hope you and yours have a good holiday season and thanks for supporting us for more than a decade.

-- David M. Cole, dmc@colepapers.net

Illustration: Joe Shoulak