NBC’s television stations in Chicago–WMAQ and WSNS–will be streaming three hours of live primary election night coverage on NBC Chicago News 24/7 from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. on March 19.

The coverage will feature WMAQ’s Mary Ann Ahern and Marion Brooks and Noticiero Telemundo Chicago’s Alfonso Gutiérrez.

“Our 24/7 live streaming channel, NBC Chicago News, will serve as an ideal viewing experience for the upcoming Illinois Primary Election, in addition to up-to-the-minute Election Night coverage on our websites, apps and social media platforms,” said Lisa Balde, VP of Digital Media at NBCUniversal Local Chicago. “Serving our viewers, wherever they are, is our mission and we’re pleased to be able to deliver our expert political coverage all year long on all our platforms.”

The 10 p.m. newscasts on both WMAQ and WSNS will feature expanded coverage as the votes are tallied and winners announced. 

On their digital platforms, the stations will also offer breaking news coverage and analysis, push alerts delivering bulletins to views, real-time results for top races, videos of candidates acceptance and concession speeches, and live blogs. 

They will also be pumping out news on their social media channels.

“From the upcoming Illinois Primary Election to this summer’s RNC and DNC Conventions to November’s highly-anticipated Presidential Election, 2024 is shaping up to be one of the more important election years in our city and nation’s history,” said Sally Ramirez, senior VP of News for NBC Chicago/Telemundo Chicago. “It’s our responsibility to provide our viewers with information they need to make important decisions. We will highlight the key players, the issues at stake and the critical importance of their vote.”

C-SPAN has firmed up its election night coverage plans.

The public affairs suite of networks launched by the cable industry as a public service will provide live coverage from 9 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 3, through 7 a.m. Wednesday, Nov. 4.

That coverage, which will include speeches by the winners and losers and coverage of Senate races, will also include viewers calls and reaction.

C-SPAN host and managing producer Greta Brawner and senior executive producer Peter Slen will anchor from 9 p.m. to 3 a.m., followed by Bill Scanlon from 3 a.m. to 7 a.m.

Washington Journal will pick up coverage from 7 a.m. through noon.

Streaming services are set to have an outsized impact on this year’s election coverage, both in terms of audience size and in the contributions they will make to more traditional broadcast coverage.

“There has been a lot of speculation about streaming in the news business but this year has shown that streaming is taking hold in a big way,” said Seni Tienabeso, executive producer of ABC News Live Prime, a primetime streaming show anchored by Linsey Davis. “The pandemic has really accelerated what was already happening in terms of people looking for other avenues to watch news, and you can see that in the audience growth. We had over 9 million people alone watching ABC News Live for the first debate. That is a huge number that ranks with any other broadcast.” 

Tienabeso and others said the streaming services are providing audiences with a much wider array of stories and coverage than viewers have ever seen. 

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Users who open the CBS News app will be able to access 12 different live feeds from 24-hour streaming service CBSN, said Christy Tanner, executive VP and general manager of CBS News Digital. They include a live feed of the CBS broadcast coverage, the national CBSN feed and 10 local feeds from CBS’s owned stations. 

“This will give us enormous flexibility in covering live events, races and outcomes simultaneously,” Tanner said.

To make it easier for viewers to find breaking news and content, CBS is launching a new capability to provide live, interactive alerts. “Viewers will get an interactive graphic on the screen when something is breaking and they will be able to use their remote to navigate to it,” Tanner said. 

Streaming services will also give audiences additional
ways to access network feeds on authenticated apps, streaming services or YouTube, where PBS NewsHour will be streaming election coverage. 

Univision will stream its national broadcast coverage starting at 7 p.m. ET on Nov. 3, senior politics editor Carlos Chirinos said, with digital teams filling breaks in the network coverage with original digital content. 

“We will be providing a heavy focus on the local level, because all politics is local,” Chirinos said. 

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The continuous nature of streaming services also gives news organizations more space and time to explain what promises to be a very complex election. “If you are just approaching this like a horse race for 12, 24, 36 hours or however [long] this goes on, that isn’t helpful to voters,” ABC News Live executive producer Katie den Daas said. “We’re preparing for the long haul so that people can turn on ABC News Live and get the kind of information they want.” 

Part of that will be improved data analytics. Journalists from the ABC News-owned polling analysis website FiveThirtyEight.com will appear on ABC News Live, den Daas said. “They will be able to explain what is happening and why,” she said. “As we inch closer to election and we are inundated with numbers and polling, they’ll be able to really frame and discuss what those numbers might mean or not mean.” 

On election night, Newsy will draw extensively on its investigative and longer-form reporting on such subjects as voting by mail, the ballot-counting process, voter suppression concerns, the integrity of the election and the Hispanic vote, Matt Simon, supervising producer for PM content at Newsy, said. 

“It is easy to go to roundtables of pundits and much harder to produce analysis that is based on fact and data and still find a way to make it compelling and interesting but that is our mission,” Simon said. 

Pandemic-related restrictions have also prompted networks to adopt much more coordinated strategies between their various platforms.

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Fox News will have a separate control room, said VP of politics and the Washington Bureau Cherie Grzech, from which she will talk to TV, digital and radio reporters, then route feeds to the various control rooms handling Fox News Channel, Fox Business Network, Fox Nation and Fox News Radio. 

“You will see reporters on multiple platforms throughout the evening,” Grzech said. “We are definitely trying to maximize the ability to move our people from one Fox platform to another.” 

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.

Data analytics firm Lotame, which says it taps billions of anonymous online profiles, has looked at the digital behavior of millions of political TV watchers and suggests they are in something of a branding sweet spot for marketers targeting addressable advertising.

“As the 2020 election quickly approaches, and COVID restrictions are keeping people at home and in front of the television, political marketers have a good chance of engaging consumers through the biggest screen at home,” said Alexandra Theriault, chief customer officer at Lotame. “Knowing information like what other shows politically engaged viewers watch and what industries they are likely to work in, helps campaigns build a profile of what messaging might resonate best in the last months before ballots are cast.”

According to Lotame Panorama*, political TV watchers** are more likely to be heavy TV viewers and hold management positions in the IT industry. In addition to politics, they like "easy to watch" genres including travel shows, home and garden shows, variety, and game shows. They are less likely to watch genres like drama, science fiction and action shows.

Related: Analysis: Presidential Candidates Didn't Benefit from Last Week's TV Town Halls

IT professionals are the most likely to be political TV watchers (23%), followed by healthcare (14%) in the number two slot. Only 2% of those in the insurance industry are political TV watchers, while perhaps surprisingly given the political activism of some in Hollywood, only 1% of those in the media and entertainment industry were identified as political TV watchers.

The largest percentage of political TV watchers are in management positions (42%), followed by non-management jobs (27%), C-suite positions (19%), and board members and ownership (12%).

*"A suite of data enrichment solutions that use first-, second- and third-party data to create and analyze addressable audiences."

**Political TV watchers are defined as "people who have tuned-in to political TV networks, talk shows, debates, town halls, and congressional hearings."

Several cable entertainment networks will join their cable news network brethren in covering tonight’s election results.

Showtime has teamed with CBS to telecast a live special starring The Late Show host Stephen Colbert, premiering at 11 p.m. on the premium cable channel. The uncensored special, Stephen Colbert’s Live election Night Democracy’s Series Finale: Who’s Going To Clean Up This Sh*t, will feature’s Colbert’s political satire as he watches the election returns come in.

Lifetime has partnered with ABC’s daytime talk show The View for a Election Night party-special beginning at 9 p.m. with guests including former Miss Universe Alicia Machado, Kathy Najimy, Vivica A. Fox, chef Rocco DiSpirito, Mario Cantone, and D.L. Hughley.

TV One beginning at 7 p.m. will celebrate the election with its six-hour News One Now 2016 Election Night Watch Party, hosted by Roland Martin and featuring such guests as Kerry Washington, Aretha Franklin, John Legend and Stevie Wonder.

On Comedy Central, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah will air live at 11 p.m. with up to the minute election coverage, followed by the first ever live segment of @Midnight.

For viewers seeking a true escape from the election, The Weather Channel is currently running a nine-hour block of pristine and relaxing scenery set against soothing jazz music, according to network officials.

Heading into the 2016 election, NBC has named Dafna Linzer to the newly-created post of managing editor of politics for NBC News and MSNBC, the network said in a note to staffers Thursday (Oct. 8).

The political desk will report to Linzer, who will divide her time between Washington and New York and report to NBC News president Deborah Turness and MSNBC president Phil Griffin, who made the announcement.

"As we’ve seen over the last few weeks, we’ve driven the campaign news agenda through every news cycle – with candidate interviews, pivotal moments and sharp analysis," Turness and Griffin said in the e-mail to staffers. "[W]e’ve also experienced great benefits when our entire organization joins forces. Now we’re putting a more formal structure in place to build on this momentum and, with the recently increased workload, to bring extra resources to address the needs of the many parts of the organization

Linzer joined MSNBC in 2013 as managing editor of MSNBC digital and most recently was senior investigative reporter for ProPublica. In that role she appered frequently on PBS NewsHour and other news programs.

Linzer's resume includes foreign correspondent for the Associated Press and national security reporter for The Washington Post.