The collapse of VNS

Ziff-Davis's Baseline magazine has a nice piece on how the Voter News Service completely collapsed during the November 2002 elections. Fascinating story. The reasons are not surprising: too many new technologies, lots of old data to integrate, no strong single control. (VNS is run and paid for by a consortium of news organizations, CNN among them.)

Back up to Election Day, Nov. 5. The balance of power in Congress was up for grabs. Yet by 10 a.m., the TV networks confirmed what they had feared for months: They couldn't derive any meaningful exit-polling data from a system they had just spent between $10 million and $15 million to overhaul.

Disasters were almost comical. Many of the more than 30,000 temporary workers collecting exit-poll information were disconnected from VNS' new voice-recognition system before they could finish inputting data over

Ziff-Davis's Baseline magazine has a nice piece on how the Voter News Service completely completely collapsed during the November 2002 elections. Fascinating story. The reasons are not surprising: too many new technologies, lots of old data to integrate, no strong single control. (VNS is run and paid for by a consortium of news organizations, CNN among them.)

I had only indirect contact with VNS at CNN. We worked with a consultant who had basically a full time job interfacing CNN's various systems to the VNS data.

The article ends with a less-than-comforting thought: now that the networks have basically killed VNS, they have only 51 weeks to get ready for the Iowa caucuses in 2004. January 2003, and we're already into presidential election season. And I thought it was bad enough that Christmas starts before Halloween.