Alaska Press Club as well as a number of media outlets and journalists posted messages about using the hashtag in the days leading up to the elections.
While some journos have been utilizing #akelect for election coverage for some time now, the 2012 elections saw a united effort at tweeting the elections using the hashtag.
I’ve gathered the tweets from Election night and done a quick analysis of how Alaska journalists used Twitter for their election night reporting.
At this point, it’s not possible to download Tweets for a hashtag–though you can download your own tweet archive now– so this data is from *manually copying the tweets into Excel, clean the data and do the analysis from there.
Highlights
- #akelect saw roughly 529 tweets on Nov. 6
- 123 Twitter users tweeted using #akelect
- @CoastAlaskaNews tweeted the most frequently with 47 tweets
- Approximately 17% of the tweets directly reported results, links to results, or information about who was in the lead in different races
- Approximately 82% of the tweets were commentary, links to website coverage, or questions to the audience about the election
Clearly, people like the voting-in-the-cold tweets. They are the most retweeted posts.
Thanks for getting this site and discussion going Heather!