The article was featured on the front of the Apple News Midterm Elections homepage.
The next day, I adapted an article for Apple News that was featured on the NYT site.
This year, in an effort to keep up with changing readership trends, which often favor off-platform news sites with content curated from multiple sources, I worked with my team and many others to plan and execute NYT Election Night coverage on Apple News.
My team collaborated closely the video infrastructure team, graphics team, data team, and off-platforms initiatives team leading up to the elections.
In order to prioritize speed and maintain the distinct experience of the Apple ecosystem, Apple News has established incredibly strict parameters that dictate how news organizations can display their content on the platform. The most restrictive of regulations for my team's purpose is that there can be no live-updating content on a given article page. Once a reader opens an article, it is cached immediately and will not change again. This presented a huge problem for the elections, where live data is crucial for coverage.
This challenge presented us with two main objectives: first, we wanted to ensure every new reader would get the most recently updated information at the time they opened the article. Second, we wanted to create a sense of liveness to the page to utilize the live data and make the article feel like a New York Times article instead of just any article on Apple News.
To address the first objective, we created a system to automate:
The larger challenge was creating a sense of liveness on the page. One of the most notorious parts of the Times' elections coverage is The Needle. We thought a compelling way to create a dynamic display and make the page feel like a Times article was to livestream the needle into the top of the page. While the Needle doesn't start moving until results start coming in, it gives a very clear indication of how the night is going. We streamed the Needle that predicted whether Democrats would gain control of the House of Representatives.
The article was featured on the front of the Apple News Midterm Elections homepage.
The next day, I adapted an article for Apple News that was featured on the NYT site.