A building that was home to media outlets Al Jazeera and the AP in Gaza City was destroyed in an Israeli air raid Saturday (May 15), according to Al Jazeera.

It was unclear whether there were any casualties, though Al Jazeera reported that Israel had warned occupants of the building, including the journalists, to evacuate an hour before the attack.

The AP said on its website that its staffers and other residents of the building had all evacuated following that call from Israeli military, after which three missiles struck the building, reducing it to rubble.

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AP had occupied top floor offices for the last 15 years, including 24-hour live shots of the rockets aimed at Israel and the Israeli airstrikes like the one that leveled the building.

“The world will know less about what is happening in Gaza because of what happened today,” said AP President and CEO Gary Pruitt in a statement. “We are shocked and horrified that the Israeli military would target and destroy the building housing AP’s bureau and other news organizations in Gaza.”

According to the New York Times, the Israeli military said it struck the building because it also housed military assets of Hamas and the AP said the military claimed Hamas was using journalists to shield those assets. But AP said it provided no evidence that was the case.

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Only the day before had it been called for Israeli forces to ensure that journalists could cover the conflict freely and safely. Following the attack on the building, CPJ Middle East and North Africa representative Ignacio Miguel Delgado said: "It is utterly unacceptable for Israel to bomb and destroy the offices of media outlets and endanger the lives of journalists, especially since Israeli authorities know where those media outlets are housed," and reiterated CPJ's call for protections. "Israeli authorities must ensure that journalists can do their jobs safely without fear of being injured or killed.”

According to Reporters Without Borders,  Israeli airstrikes during the conflict have already destroyed buildings housing numerous media outlets including the pan-Arab TV channel Al-Araby and radio and TV outlet Al-Aqsa, with Israel saying Hamas was hiding weapons in those buildings as well.

Systems for calling races and data analytics, always a centerpiece of election-night coverage, will assume an even more important role Nov. 3 as part of an effort to overcome some of the widely publicized problems from 2016.

One issue: “Exit polls showed Hillary Clinton winning the race,” Associated Press deputy managing editor for visual and digital journalism Derl McCrudden said. 

And Election Day exit polls typically didn’t take early voting into account. About 41% of ballots were cast before Election Day in 2016, with those figures expected to be much higher this year. The U.S. Elections Project at the University of Florida has reported as of Oct. 20, more than 35.1 million votes had already been cast in the 2020 general election. In some states, such as Wisconsin and North Carolina, the number of mail-in ballots received is already multiple times higher than 2016’s totaln Analysts have predicted more than 150 million votes will be cast in the election, up from 136.7 million in 2016. 

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The AP rethought its strategy and developed the AP VoteCast product with NORC at the University of Chicago. In 2018, the VoteCast team conducted nearly 139,000 interviews with registered voters in 50 states. In 2020, VoteCast is aiming to do some 140,000 interviews between Oct. 28 and Nov. 3. 

In addition to VoteCast, AP plays a major role in collecting vote totals, deploying stringers at county election centers around the U.S. AP’s decision desk will help call some 7,000 races in 2020. 

Those efforts will also supply AP with data that can be used to develop election-related stories and adds people on the ground to provide information on potential voting irregularities. “That will drive a lot of reporting, because we have that background data and know where stories are bubbling up,” McCrudden said. 

“We know the stakes are unbelievably high this year,” David Bohrman, executive producer of CBS News’s 2020 election night coverage, said. “The American public is frankly confused about what election night is going to bring. How are their votes going to be counted? Are they going to be counted? And how long it will take? We have to step up with more and better tools to explain what is going on.” 

As part of that effort, CBS News launched CBS News Battleground Tracker, surveying 100,000 people from all 50 states. On Nov. 3, the data will be used for the in-studio Election Night Tracker and the decision desk led by CBS News elections and survey director Anthony Salvanto. 

Bohrman said CBS will be using a new multi-touch screen as well as dozens of displays and augmented reality tools to take advantage of the new data. “We’ll be using augmented reality in ways that will really clarify and help viewers understand what is going on,” he said. 

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At Fox News, Cherie Grzech, VP of politics and the Washington Bureau, said the Fox News Voter Analysis, conducted with AP, will be a marked improvement from exit polls and provide a wealth of survey data to analyze voting trends and attitudes. “We now have a much more robust system that involves questioning folks a few days prior to the election and then on Election Day,” she explained. 

The network is also upgrading the way that data will be displayed, Alan Komissaroff, senior VP of news and politics at Fox News, said. There will be upgrades to the touch screen used by Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer to better display voting and survey data, improved augmented reality systems and new virtual reality features. 

“Virtual worlds that can be set up now through video game software are now very compelling,” Komissaroff said. “While I don’t want to tip our hand too much, we will try to take people into hyper-realistic worlds to help tell the story.” 

New studios at ABC and Univision will also enable innovative new augmented-reality systems. 

“Election night is very graphics-driven, very studio-driven, so we have put a lot of focus on that part of it with a new set of augmented reality graphics to show the presidential, congressional and state races,” Lourdes Torres, senior VP of political coverage and special projects at Univision, said. 

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Marc Burstein, senior executive producer of ABC News Special Events, said ABC’s new studio will feature more than new systems for graphics and augmented reality. It is part of a wider effort to rethink how the results are displayed and reported.

“Under the vote totals in the past, you had in small, almost unnoticeable type the percent of precincts reporting,” he said. “This year, we will have it in big bold numbers and it won’t say percent of precincts reporting, it will say percent of expected vote in,” to better highlight how many actual votes have been tabulated. 

“It’s a small detail, but it shows the kind of focus and attention we’re putting on the coverage,” Burstein said.

Kathleen Carroll, SVP and executive editor of the Associated Press, will be exiting at the end of the year, the global news outlets said Wednesday (July 20).

Carroll has led the news operation for the past 14 years, and says she will be taking a break for some family time and "sleeping in on weekdays for a while." She came to AP from Knight Ridder where she was Washington bureau chief as well as chief of the international bureaus.

During her tenure AP has won five Pulitzers and a shelf-full of George Polk and Overseas Press Club awards. “If AP were a sports team, we would be retiring Kathleen's number,” said AP President and CEO Gary Pruitt in announcing the exit.

Carroll is vice-chair of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

No replacement has been named, but the search is on, starting internally.

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The Associated Press is looking to give Web surfers a different perspective on the news. Make that lots of different perspectives.

AP is launching a virtual reality/360 video digital channel in collaboration with AMD, which will provide the image rendering and graphic tech.

AP has already used VR technology for a story about Worldport, a Kentucky packaging and sorting facility, and a story about a migrant camp in Calais, France, as well as providing some self-guided tours of the Star Wars opening and some high-end accommodations for well-heeled travelers.

AP said it will have complete control over the editorial content on the new channel, which is at www.bigstory.ap.org/VR360.

“Each new publishing technology reinvents how we experience news, and VR promises the next revolution by immersing us deep in a story,” said Paul Cheung, AP’s director of interactive and digital news production, in a statement.