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“There
was no script. Things kept happening that never happened before.”
So began a front page story by Washington Post reporter David Von Drehle about the deadlocked 2000 presidential election. Those words also could describe how the newspaper covered the election – from the parties’ national conventions right on through the 36-day-long count in Florida. Because of the Internet, we covered this story differently from any story we had ever covered before, combining the depth of print journalism with the immediacy of broadcast. In addition to extensive coverage of the election each morning in The Washington Post itself, our political reporters covered breaking news that appeared on The Washington Post Company’s Internet site, washingtonpost.com, all day long. One of our senior political reporters, Chuck Babington, wrote a “lead-all” summary of new election developments several times a day for publication on the web site. Our media reporter, Howard Kurtz, wrote a daily web column reviewing election news in other newspapers, with links to their web sites. Many of our top political journalists, including David Broder, Dan Balz, and Bob Woodward, participated, along with politicians from both parties, in washingtonpost.com online forums and video “web cast” interviews and panel discussions. All this was supplemented on the web site by live, “streaming” video of press conferences and speeches, video clips of their highlights, and full texts and transcripts. Between The Washington Post and washingtonpost.com, we blended print and broadcast news cycles with the limitless capacity and interactivity of the web to keep news-hungry readers fully informed around the clock. When the Florida recount began, we assigned dozens of reporters to cover all the recounting and legal maneuvering. They reported many of the fast-moving events on washingtonpost.com as quickly as television could, but in greater depth and with more context. After Vice President Gore conceded the election, we sent our reporters back to all the principal players to question them exhaustively about what they had thought, said, and done during those tense, action-packed weeks. Their findings were published at the end of January in an eight-part series in the newspaper and the next month in a book, Deadlock: The Inside Story of America’s Closest Election. Throughout our coverage of the election and its aftermath, we demonstrated that The Washington Post and washingtonpost.com, working together, could be a different and more dynamic news medium than a newspaper alone or a web site alone. “A news organization that less than 18 months ago was operating pretty much under a one-deadline-per-day situation has shown that it can respond quickly and provide first-class journalism throughout the day for web readers,” said Tracy Grant, The Washington Post newsroom editor in charge of providing breaking news coverage to washingtonpost.com. Noting the record numbers of web users coming to washingtonpost.com for coverage of the election, she added, “If Election Night and its aftermath taught us anything about the web, it’s that news drives traffic.” We also continued to publish in the newspaper enterprise journalism that made a difference during 2000. Metro staff reporters Katherine Shaver and David S. Fallis reported that convicted drunken drivers in suburban Montgomery County, Maryland, usually avoided jail and were able to continue driving even after they killed people on the road or were repeatedly arrested for drunken driving. National staff reporter Michael Grunwald wrote a year-long series of articles detailing how the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, in partner-ship with members of Congress, have been over-engineering America’s rivers and watersheds, spending billions of taxpayers’ money, and threatening the environment. Several of the projects he spotlighted were stopped, and changes were made in the Corps’ leadership and mission. A team of investigative reporters and foreign correspondents revealed how multi-national pharmaceutical companies exploited poor, uneducated, and diseased people in Third World countries around the globe for the testing of new drugs without informed consent, sufficient safety precautions, or follow-up care. And another team of reporters explained how pharmaceutical companies and the United Nations have done little to combat the deadly scourge of AIDS in Africa with drug treatment regimens that are extending lives in the United States.
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