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Ziff-Davis's Baseline magazine has a nice piece on how the Voter News
Service completely
collapsed during the November 2002 elections. Fascinating story.
The reasons are not surprising: too many new technologies, lots of old
data to integrate, no strong single control. (VNS is run and paid for
by a consortium of news organizations, CNN among them.)
Back up to Election Day, Nov. 5. The balance of power in
Congress was up for grabs. Yet by 10 a.m., the TV networks confirmed
what they had feared for months: They couldn't derive any meaningful
exit-polling data from a system they had just spent between $10
million and $15 million to overhaul.
Disasters were almost comical. Many of the more than 30,000
temporary workers collecting exit-poll information were disconnected
from VNS' new voice-recognition system before they could finish
inputting data over
Ziff-Davis's Baseline magazine has a nice piece on how the Voter News
Service completely completely
collapsed during the November 2002 elections. Fascinating story.
The reasons are not surprising: too many new technologies, lots of old
data to integrate, no strong single control. (VNS is run and paid for
by a consortium of news organizations, CNN among them.)
I had only indirect contact with VNS at CNN. We worked with
a consultant who had basically a full time job interfacing CNN's
various systems to the VNS data.
The article ends with a less-than-comforting thought: now that the networks have basically killed VNS, they have only 51 weeks to get ready for
the Iowa caucuses in 2004. January 2003, and we're already into presidential election
season. And I thought it was bad enough that
Christmas starts before Halloween.
12:50:02 PM 
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