In a historical election that eventually saw the African National Congress (ANC) party lose for the first time in three decades, South Africa’s news media companies were tasked with a significant challenge: how to plan election coverage in a rapidly changing political landscape.

In addition to realising the ruling party could lose its power, news organisations were also looking at how to reach audiences in a digital environment and educate younger, first-time voters.

During the Webinar, How South Africa’s newsrooms covered historical polls in a digital-first news environment, INMA members heard the challenges faced by two media companies — Netwerk24 and Independent Online (IOL) — and how they responded to those challenges.

Netwerk24 shares its video strategy

Before it began planning election coverage, Netwerk24 had to determine what its goals were, explained Nadia Honiball, national news editor. With many first-time voters participating, education and providing information were a priority. Planning for the elections began in 2023 with monthly meetings.

One big change since the 2019 elections is the company’s video strategy: “Our multimedia team has developed into a vibrant part of our newsroom, and we decided to utilise this team to the maximum with this election,” she said, adding that their video efforts were “complimented by our political teams, articles, updates and opinion pieces, as well as contributions from freelance independent columnists.”

To boost reader engagement, it created polls and quizzes that used the parties’ manifestos, so as readers took the quiz, they learned about what the different parties stand for. “This helped to educate our readers,” Honiball said. “And we used graphics a lot to explain complex topics.”

As an aid for first-time voters, Netwerk24 explained how things work on voting day and what to expect.

The coverage had a strong multimedia focus, and Mia Spies, multimedia content specialist, explained how the company leveraged video to build engagement. “We are very cognisant of how popular short-form videos are,” she said.

One video project featured a young journalist who “went out and spoke to young voters, first time voters, asking them if they’re going to vote. If not, why not? What are they basing their votes on? What’s the biggest issues for them?  That was a nice way to use mobile journalism.”

The newsroom also did short, 15-minute sit-down interviews with more than 20 party leaders.

“Instead of just interviewing analysts and not getting direct comments from the party leaders, I went directly to the party leaders and we had sit down interviews with them. And then from that information we got a lot of follow-up articles that we could share as well,” Spies said.

Those interviews led to a second project called 7 Questions, 10 Leaders, where the same seven questions were asked to party leaders.  

Then, a separate video was created for each question and the answers were placed back to back, allowing viewers to see exactly where the candidates stood on each issue.

“This was very popular among our readers,” Spies said. “I think mostly our parties are completely different in most of these stances, so it was actually very interesting to see the answers back-to-back.”

Then, a pre-election podcast focused on the who, what, where, when, and why of the election: “We realised that there are basic questions — how do you vote, register to vote, really going back to basics and explaining it in the most simple terms.”

Pre-election Webinars in the weeks leading up to the election addressed some of the most important questions and issues.

Covering the election

For election day, Netwerk24 created a live blog that ran for 24 hours:

“We blogged from when people started voting until the final results came out. That was five days nonstop,” Honiball said. “At the end we counted 115 hours of continuous reporting and we divided our journalists into shifts as well as our subeditors and our homepage editors. A lot of us stayed awake a very, very long time.”

All Netwerk24 journalists worked the election and were spread throughout the country to provide on-the-ground reporting that included live vlogging, written text, and videos. The company set up a temporary studio and the Provincial Results Centre and produced three live shows during the election day.

“Then, as the news unfolded there, we spoke to party leaders, we spoke to anyone that we could find there, and it was really good to have our own studio as we could pull in people as the results came in,” Spies said. “We did some really great interviews [and had] a big screen at the back showing the results as they changed.”

While Netwerk24 had high hopes for the traffic during this election, the results far exceeded its expectations, with a 50% increase in average total daily pageviews during the election.

“Our dedicated elections category had a 600% increase in traffic since the first of April, and an additional 547% in the week of the election,” Spies said. “Then on our live blog, we had a lot of new subscribers there, threefold subscriptions for this live blog in relation to our regular top performing content.”

In an era of fake news and AI-generated visuals, Honiball said news media companies must be more vigilant than ever. She also noted the addition of short-form video and live interviews gave subscribers considerable value and contributed immensely to the traffic and interest in coverage.

“We were more aware than ever of our responsibility in reporting accurately correcting misinformation and not inadvertently inciting conflict,” she said. “It’s all been very exciting and it’s been such a privilege to be part of this election.”

Inside IOL’s mobile-first strategy

As one of South Africa’s first news Web sites, IOL has an audience of over 8 million and covers lifestyle, news, business, and sports. As the elections neared, the company knew this would be the country’s first mobile-first and digital-first election.

“Never before has an election in South Africa ever been consumed in a mobile environment, in a digital-first environment,” said Lee Rondganger, deputy editor. “This was going to be very unique. We also knew that there was going to be a hunger for multimedia and we had to adapt to this.”

IOL responded by setting up a “one stop shop” elections portal with the latest news updates, opinions, analysis, party manifestoes, videos, data, and polls. “This is where all our multimedia content lived, and if somebody just wants to know about the elections, this is where they would go,” he said.

Then, it commissioned face-to-face surveys that involved some 6,000 respondents. When the results indicated the ANC would fall below 50% approval, Rondganger said he was among those who had trouble believing the numbers: “But those were the results that were coming out and we wrote about it. We told the story in a very graphic way and with multimedia.”

Additionally, IOL assembled a team of opinion writers and contributors to provide thought-provoking analysis to explain why people were voting in a certain way.

“We assembled some of the brightest minds in our country and these writers were able to explain things that were happening in South Africa and why the sands were shifting beneath our feet in real time,” he said.

A series of livestream election panel discussions drew more than 500 attendees with more than 1,000 streaming it live and eventually gaining more than 40,000 views.

“We were able to slice up the big talking points at these debates and cut them up in for YouTube shorts and TikTok videos and put them on our social media,” Rondganger said. “And this really did drive engagement with our readers.”

IOL also embarked on an aggressive digital marketing campaign to promote election coverage across all its digital platforms, including digital ads on Facebook and X and marketing it in print titles as well.

Singular focus

With a small newsroom, IOL had to think about how to deliver on content so it strategically reconfigured the newsroom to make sure it could optimise its team. Staff was trained on things like verification, fact checking and real time video updates. And the company also made a bold decision to have every journalist in every department be involved in the elections. “We have a very small news team, but we also have lifestyle journalists and sports journalists,” Rondganger explained.

“So during the election period, we decided that everybody was going to do a bit of politics, whether you were in sports, lifestyle, or news, because it was going to be the most talked about topic, that’s going to be the most discussed issue that we are going to face. And everybody had to adapt.”

Without a dedicated multimedia team, IOL trained its entire staff to use their mobile phones for coverage, essentially making everyone in the newsroom a mobile journalist: “We trained our staff how to shoot video, what’s the best way to do it, how to edit videos, how to put our logo in it, and how to submit it to the person who basically put this online on our platforms.”

The limited resources meant that the news team had to be strategic on election day, and Rondganger said everyone came through: “Everybody in our newsroom [had their] phone in hand, shooting video, taking pictures, working more than 18 hours a day most days during the elections. And I think we were able to cover every issue that came up.”

For post-election coverage, it conducted video interviews and livestream press conferences from the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC). That helped keep audiences engaged, as did a live blog that was manned from 6 a.m. until midnight every day. The blog contained any breaking news as well as videos and pictures and was promoted on IOL’s social media channels.

“We drove the newsroom to focus on mobile first,” Rondganger said. “This was our big strategy. We knew that a lot of our readers are going to come to us on mobile, so we developed a multimedia content creation strategy driven by user analytics and data.”

IOL measured everything, looking at what was trending hour by hour, and using that to inform who it interviewed, the headlines it wrote, and the stories it chased. With so many constraints, it had to focus on what to cover — and how to cover it.  

That focus paid off, with more than 2 million video views and more than 75 million pageviews on the elections portal page. During the election period, it produced 3,500 stories and had more than 8 million users.

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