Election coverage is a foundational part of many newsrooms. The press is critical to keeping democracy — and free and fair elections — afloat, and election cycles offer ample opportunities to reinforce our value to readers through reader service and utility journalism.

But this also means live results coverage can become a crowded space. News consumers are also becoming increasingly digitally savvy and expect to receive these results in real time via sophisticated news apps and experiences.

For these reasons, and many more, Hearst Newspapers (HNP) set out to centralise our data, engineering, and front-end development work starting with the 2024 election cycle.

The effort, led by the Hearst DevHub, aimed to deliver products, processes, and content strategies that were ambitious in scope and efficient to publish across dozens of local newsrooms with varied audiences and resources.

At the centre of this strategy were two high-value interactive products — voter guides and hyperlocal live results pages — as well as data-driven reporting about the candidates, voters, and issues. These highly visual tools and storytelling formats were built by the DevHub and scaled to dozens of local newsrooms.

Finding the audience

In total, Hearst Newspapers published 34 voter guides, 62 live results pages, and 200 individual race result embeds in 2024. This was a significant increase from our 2020 and 2022 coverage, when the newspaper group published 21 live results pages and 18 voter guides during the two election cycles combined.

The effort also resonated with audiences. During the 2024 cycle, Hearst’s interactive election projects had four times more visits and converted at a 20% higher rate than traditional articles.

What’s more, we were able to staff this new elections initiative with a team of fewer than 10 engineers and designers. Many organisations have election teams three times this size producing fewer individual pieces of content.

To accomplish this, we focused on a few key ideas, which allowed us to bring interactive experiences to new audiences and newsrooms of varying resources, many without their own engineers: 

• Flexible and intuitive design: We created modular, highly scannable page layouts with optional visual features and expandable sections, allowing for varying amounts of text and information.
• Emphasis on utility features: Especially for the voter guides, we prioritised features like an address lookup and a “create your own ballot” tool, where users could save their choices and then print, copy, or e-mail them.
• A strong data foundation: A lot of behind-the-scenes work went into building and maintaining a complex data pipeline that scraped real-time national results from the Associated Press and more than 20 county elections boards. These county-level scrapers allowed HNP newsrooms to provide hyperlocal data not available anywhere else.
• Ease of use: Our entire election rig runs on a Google Sheets-based publishing system, similar to HNP’s innovative Click-2-Publish programme. This system enables newsrooms to create their own universe of results pages, organised around specific geographies, and to easily generate individual embeds for use on homepages and related articles.
• Communication and coordination: We maintained contact with newsrooms through Slack and held biweekly Zoom meetings, also providing them with production timelines, promotional plans, and comprehensive documentation.

The payoff

As a result of this effort, HNP saw a 280% increase in production of interactive election content between 2022 and 2024.

By using the DevHub’s centralised elections infrastructure, local newsrooms were able to give readers access to widespread coverage of national races while focusing the bulk of their resources on what they uniquely could provide: deep coverage of state and local races and context about what this all meant for local audiences.

The work we did during last year’s election cycle has been critical as Hearst newsrooms cover local off-year elections in 2025 with limited resources. It also provides a strong foundation for us to continue building and innovating as we head into the consequential 2026 mid-terms elections.

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