At the Visualized Conference in New York City Friday, Carter explained how he and the NYT’s graphics team came up with their “Paths to the White House” tool. Carter began by looking at past tools the paper had used — all the way back to the 1896 election, in which William McKinley defeated William Jennings Bryant. The morning after the election, the NYT ran a color-coded electoral map on its front page: white states for McKinley, black for Bryant. “They got some states wrong,” Carter said, but “everyone knows how to read this.”

There are several problems with color-coded electoral maps, though, Carter said. First, there’s the “area problem” (many states that are large in geographic size have a small number of electoral votes). The maps may also look very similar across elections even when the results are different. Carter showed red and blue electoral maps from the past four elections and at a glance they all look the same. If you make a color-coded map more interactive — allowing a user to click a state and fill it with a new color, for example — that overrides any information the New York Times has added: “The more you use it, the less useful it is.” Finally, Carter said, these maps are just “boring” and “not very fun.” (Which isn’t to say that the NYT abandoned them completely — the “President Map” illustrating this post is another tool the paper offered this year.)

Carter and the graphics team ultimately came up with “512 Paths to the White House” (when he showed it on the projector, the audience cheered). Users could create their own paths. “We struggle a lot with stepping people through things or letting them explore themselves,” Carter said. The NYT decided that users could test their own paths, but there were annotations for highlighted paths at the bottom of the page to help them get context.

Disclosure: GigaOM is a media partner for the Visualized Conference.

99 bottles of beer on the wall 99 bottles of beer

— Drunk Diane Sawyer (@DrnkDianeSawyer) November 7, 2012

im not drunk u gusys r dunk — Drunk Diane Sawyer (@DrnkDianeSawyer) November 7, 2012

While tiredness rather than tippling likely caused Sawyer’s condition, the Twitter account provided a fun way to record a micro-meme that sprung up on election night. Sawyer wasn’t the only source of fun. Nate Silver, whose 538 blog overshadowed his employer The New York Times on election night, became a target too. Here’s how a satirist cleverly mocked the pollster’s portentousness and the public’s sudden fixation with data driven reporting:

Now is the nowcast of our forecasts, made glorious projection by this mean of polls.

— Nate Silver 2.0 (@fivethirtynate) November 6, 2012

I grasp from the beak of a silver dove a laurel wreath of finely-wrought permutations. The Signal has come at last.

— Nate Silver 2.0 (@fivethirtynate) November 7, 2012

Drunk Diane and fake Nate are fleeting by their nature — they cause a chuckle and then vanish in days or months. But one day they may also carry historical significance in the same way that newspaper cartoons serve as a vital tool for political scholars. Consider how well these spoof tweets sum up a central narrative of the 2012 election — the Republicans lost because they couldn’t broaden their demographic base:

We were going to retake the Senate, but Republicans have a way of shutting that whole process down. #Akin #Mourdock #election2012

— Willard Mitt Romney (@MlTTR0MNEY) November 7, 2012

Wait! Wait! Stop everything! We found the Whitey Tape!! #4moreyears

— Willard Mitt Romney (@MlTTR0MNEY) November 7, 2012

(Image by  jbor via Shutterstock)

That was the counterintuitive thing about last night: If you were watching a major news network or following Twitter, you were pretty sure that Barack Obama was your next president by 11:15. If you were instead relying on NYTimes.com and 538.com for the news, you might have gone to bed thinking the election was still up in the air.

The networks began projecting Obama had won a little before 11:15 p.m. as the votes from Ohio rolled in.

NBC News declares Barack Obama as the projected winner of the Presidency of United States. More at NBCNews.com #NBCPolitics

— NBC News (@NBCNews) November 7, 2012

Fox News projects #Obama re-elected president fxn.ws/Svj9UI via @foxnewspolitics #election2012

— Fox News (@FoxNews) November 7, 2012

That was also Obama tweeted the following…

This happened because of you. Thank you.

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) November 7, 2012

…and tweeted and Facebooked the photo that has now become the most-retweeted tweet ever.

Four more years. twitter.com/BarackObama/st… — Barack Obama (@BarackObama) November 7, 2012

Yet the New York Times — and Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, which accounted for a massive amount of traffic to the New York Times this week (with 71 percent of visits to NYTimes.com’s politics section also including a stop at Silver’s blog) — were silent, with the NYT’s homepage headline alternating between reporting Obama’s win in Pennsylvania and saying that the networks projected Obama had won the election. My husband was working late, and when I called him at 11:15 p.m. to discuss the Obama win, he said, “Are you sure? The Times doesn’t have anything.” At the same time, people outside on my street were cheering. The New York Times did not project that Obama had won the election until 12:03 a.m.

Breaking News: President Barack Obama Wins Re-election, The New York Times Projectsnyti.ms/TvricB — The New York Times (@nytimes) November 7, 2012

At that point, this was happening in Chicago, per the NYT’s own election blog:

Romney supporters were clearing out:

Nobody tell Rove, but the Ohio GOP has conceded and gone home. twitter.com/daveweigel/sta…

— daveweigel (@daveweigel) November 7, 2012

And the Empire State building had turned blue.

#BREAKING: The Empire State Building is BLUE. #ObamaWins

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) November 7, 2012

Nate Silver has built his reputation on accurately predicting elections, and it looks as if his model got all 50 states right last night, though votes in Florida and Virginia are still being counted. But if you were looking for commentary from him last night, particularly after the networks announced an Obama win and the Obama campaign started celebrating, he and the NYT were not the place to get it — even though readers were seeking him out.

Instead, a lot of discussion of the results was coming from Karl Rove, who was arguing on Fox News with the network’s own anchors that they’d called Ohio too early.

The delay makes some sense: Silver has to be cautious, and the New York Times has to protect its own reputation. It can’t call the election too early and it doesn’t want to risk a Dewey defeats Truman moment. But Nate Silver is the man of the hour, the NYT’s top brand and probably traffic driver yesterday, and he could have brought even more traffic to the site between 11:15 p.m. and 12:03 a.m. if he’d been saying, well, anything.

@fivethirtyeight Little slow, eh?

— Tyler Hicks-Wright (@tghw) November 7, 2012

He, or another Times writer, could have written about why the Times hadn’t called the election yet and explained to readers what they were waiting for. But last night the paper was too slow to get in on the action, and readers who wanted a really good sense of how the election was unfolding had to turn to other sources.

Update, 4:19 p.m.: The NYT’s recently appointed public editor Margaret Sullivan commented on the NYT’s slowness on her blog. “Journalism history is full of cautionary tales about ill-fated instances of jumping the gun – whether the famous “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline in The Chicago Tribune or, much more recently, the many newspapers and cable networks who got the presidential results wrong in 2000,” she writes. And “unlike the television networks, which depend on their combined exit polls in calling elections, The Times prefers to look at real numbers in addition to exit polls, said Janet Elder, an associate managing editor who is part of The Times’s election ‘decision desk.’”

The site has just launched and for now contains only a handful of photos, but this screenshot of photos submitted to Electiongrams by Georgia politicos gives you the basic idea:

The significance of Electionsgrams for NBC is that it gives the network another news tool for election night. But, on a broader level, the site also represents a new phase in citizen reporting.

It’s true that media outlets have long drawn on the voice of their viewers through Twitter or tools like CNN’s iReport. Electionsgrams, however, means that NBC and others can easily tap into photo-based reporting on an unprecedented scale. The flood of photos on the site provides a cheap and near-frictionless way for NBC to add color to its coverage and keep up with real time events.

According to Ryan Osborn, VP of Digital Innovation at NBC News, these new citizen submission tools are not a replacement for people on the ground but a “nice complement” to existing coverage.

Mass-scale photo reporting offers a new form of coverage but also creates new challenges for traditional news outlets: how to find the good stuff in the deluge of photos? And how to screen out the mischief-makers who will try to spam the system with ads, fake news or worse?

In the case of Electiongrams, NBC is relying on a start-up called Chute that provides back-end tools for large-scale photo management to brands and large media companies. Chute helps its clients pull in photos that people share through email or sites like Facebook, but also offers human and automated moderating tools.

According to CEO Ranvir Gujral, the Chute moderation tools are part of an enterprise solution for brands and big media companies that are trying to swim through the massive new stream of user photos flooding the internet.

A quick look at NBC’s Hurricane Sandy photo-sharing site, Stormgrams, shows the moderation is working – sort of. The state-by-state storm collages are largely free of ads but do contain a fair number of irrelevant pictures like this one:

This doesn’t mean NBC is on the wrong track, though. The company appears to recognize that sites Twitter and Instagram have come to influence major news events as much as any desk anchor or gumboot-wearing weatherman, and is responding appropriately.

NBC’s Ryan says sites like Electiongrams are part of a larger process in which news companies are using people-based platforms to news gather. “We use them as an early barometer,” he said, “and then the work for journalists begins.”

The “Shadow Conventions” will run online August 27–30, during the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., and September 4–6 during the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C. The featured topics are “the war on drugs,” “poverty and job creation” and “the influence of money on our politics.” The Huffington Post covered the same topics in the physical conventions it held with grassroots groups in 2000, but this year they are taking place entirely online.

The Huffington Post website will be “taken over” by coverage and its sections will focus on specific related areas. The hosts on HuffPost Live, the site’s newly launched streaming video network, will also offer coverage. “By putting a full-court press on these neglected issues — and bringing the community into the heart of the discussion — we can have a convention that’s unscripted, surprising, and serves as more than an over-produced, tightly controlled political commercial for the two parties,” said Roy Sekoff, HuffPost Live president.

The report (sub.req’d) says that the Romney campaign is the first to buy ads delivered on Apple’s advertising platform, iAd. The campaign explained the ad purchases to the Journal, saying that mobile devices are ”the most personal device you carry. We felt like we wanted to connect with people where they spend their time.”

Romney’s move also suggests that, in the same way that 2008 was the first social media election, the 2012 campaign will be the first to include widespread adoption of mobile ads.

Both campaigns are predicted to spend $159 million on online advertising, and the mobile portion of that could help shape the extent to which consumers will accept ads on their phones and tablets. So far, mobile advertising has sputtered despite perennial predictions of a big breakout. Skeptics say that mobile screens are too small for effective advertising and consumers find the ads intrusive.

The Romney campaign is betting that the mobile ads will lead to deeper engagement and encourage voters to donate and share the Romney messages with their friends. The Obama campaign and Apple declined to comment to the Journal on Romney’s iAd initiative. Both sides have been using Google’s mobile ad network.

The Republican campaign is also augmenting its mobile strategy with its ‘With Mitt‘ app, an Instagram like tool that lets supporters share photos overlaid with patriotic or pro-Romney images. The app appears to be a clever idea in light of the enormous population of sharing online photos — what Om calls “the basic unit of digital emotion.”

The “With Mitt” app, which lets users share photos by email, Facebook or Twitter, appears to have smoothed over an earlier glitch in which it misspelled “America.” Here’s an example, using the “I’m a Mom for Mitt” overlay :

I couldn’t find an Obama campaign equivalent to ‘With Mitt’ but the incumbent’s team is touting its official Obama 2012 app that allows users to receive news, donate and more.

(Main image a still from Romney iPhone video via WSJ)