Times Now raises the bar on Bihar Election coverage

Arnab Goswami, President – News and Editor-in-Chief, Times Now & ET Now in a round table today morning reflected upon a number of relevant issues – key among them being Bihar Assembly elections. He discussed the effort, strategies and tools pertaining to comprehensive Bihar election coverage and exit polls.

Talking about the success Times Now saw in the previous general elections, Goswami expressed, "In the last general elections, we were miles ahead of the competition with about 50% market share. Typically, we found out that during an election our viewership goes higher; for us viewership during elections is the indicator of credibility that the channel enjoys. Our coverage is completely different from the old fashioned coverage done by some other channels."

The sample base for the exit poll is around 35000+ odd people covering over 243 constituencies in the state during the polling days. Led by Goswami and supported by a top notch team of experts, including former journalists and pshepologist Jai Mrug, the Exit Poll was carried out by C Voter in association with India TV. 

For an in-depth coverage of Bihar assembly elections results, Times Now has introduced new tools like Clusters, Firewall and Spectrum which add up to the better coverage and better collection of data and extrapolation of data resulting in better data analysis. The graphical tool called Cluster is a tool which analysis results on the basis of social, demographic or political similarities and profile of a constituency.

Second is Firewall where we have live data analysis which tells you whether any individual constituencies bucking the overall trend. Third is concept of a spectrum whereby you literally on a band put the entire result out and code it as per colours. For example NDA – Saffron, Green is JDU, you code the band on colours and as the result comes, the band gets filled with colour. So you can compare the band of this election to band of last election. 

In another direction, The Times Now digital team has a 24/7 monitoring strategy which is aided by an array of monitoring tools to gauge sentiment and trends across social media. For the Bihar election poll, Times Now will be using a hashtag, #Nov8witharnab on the twitter platform.

A detailed analysis of elections would be yet another highlight of this coverage. The panel would include names like Sunil Alagh, Saba Naqvi, Sankarshan Thakur, R Rajagopalan, Kumar Ketkar, Hartosh Singh Bal, Ajoy Bose, Arati Jerath, Shahid Siddiqui, Neerja Chowdhury.