Arizona: Super Tuesday

The three media markets in Arizona I choose to review for their Super Tuesday coverage are Phoenix, Tucson, and Mesa, which is a fast-growing suburb of Phoenix. In Phoenix, I focused on a paper called the Arizona Business Gazette and their ABC affiliate, KNXV-TV, or ABC15 Phoenix. The Tucson newspaper I choose was the Arizona Daily Star, and a CBS television affiliate, KOLD News 13. For Mesa, I looked at the East Valley Tribune, and the local FOX affiliate, FOX10, or MyFoxPhoenix. I had great difficulty finding original content from the sites I visited concerning Super Tuesday voting in Arizona. The stories I found were related to last-minute work bring done by locals for the candidate's campaigns, or talking about 'watch parties' that took place. The content I found on the sites related to the television stations was written fairly well for the web. The long-form writing I saw was from the newspaper's sites, and I'm sure those were stories that had been written for print, and included no local updates of any sort. The Fox10 site best exemplified multimedia, they had video coverage of John McCain's rounds of Arizona on Super Tuesday, as well as photos and interesting graphics. The site that i found best exemplified interactivity was that of the East Valley Tribune. They had reporter blogs and message boards, and It seemed that there was much buzz concerning local political opinion. The stories on the television affiliate sites were organized for the scanner, with headlines and bold writing, and the newspaper sites included more in-depth coverage and localized opinions. In addition, not only did the web summaries duplicate the lead, they were the lead! While using search tools, a short headline would pop up along with the first few lines of the story. Super Tuesday coverage in Arizona was typical of that in other states, plenty of AP reports, but also a few strong local stories, especially since a Republican front-runner, John McCain is from Arizona.