The What: With both Canada and the United States gearing up for national elections, Bannister Lake is offering media organizations innovative web-based solutions to complement and augment their on-air presentations and dramatically expand election coverage.
The What Else: Bannister Lake HTML5-based web widgets use multiple static and real-time data sources to provide online and mobile audiences with easy-to-navigate, map-based visualizations to dig deeper into contextual election data.
Bannister Lake's development team has taken full advantage of the React JavaScript Framework to build web solutions that are lightweight, fully responsive, and run on the client side. This approach efficiently manages large volumes of election data while dramatically speeding up data retrieval and allowing users to access the solution on any device.
"At Bannister Lake we chose to develop web widgets that fully leverage the client side to avoid each query going back to the server," said Bannister Lake president Georg Hentsch. "This provides a far superior user experience. And by incorporating live results, key demographic data, historical voting patterns, or other important data—all run through our unique development approach—producers can create more compelling journalism."
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The highly visual, animated, and interactive web widgets allow users to easily navigate directly to specific election races, districts, or regions to retrieve results. This capability provides broadcasters with more editorial options, allowing their on-air productions to focus on national trends, background, key races, and upsets, while the online presentation can provide a more localized and interactive presentation. Web widgets can be embedded directly into web pages or into applications to take full advantage of audiences using any device.
Web widgets can also be incorporated into on-set presentations via touchscreen displays, allowing presenters to walk viewers through important races and examine election trends.
Bannister Lake offers broadcasters two powerful election software products: Elector, designed for parliamentary style elections and Chameleon, which is equipped with an election module geared toward U.S. elections. Both solutions allow producers to take full advantage of Bannister Lake's query, data management, and RESTful API capabilities.
The Bottom Line: Web widgets expand upon Bannister Lake's expertise in handling election results data while creating exciting new opportunities for journalists to target online and mobile audiences. As broadcast audiences continue to drift online, the solution provides broadcasters with an opportunity to retain audiences with dynamic election graphics synchronized with their on-air presentations.
