How are news organisations covering the UK's general election 2024?

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak arrives in Downing Street 25/10/2022. Picture by Lauren Hurley / No 10 Downing Street

Credit: Number 10 on Flickr sourced via Creative Commons 4.0 licence

The UK election is upon us and newsrooms have been coming up with innovative ways to interview politicians, capture voters' concerns and get a sense of how the political picture is being redrawn.

Manifesto explainers

The average voter does not have time to sift through all party manifestos so explainers work great to break them down.

Channel 4 did a helpful 60-second breakdown of each party manifesto, and the youth-focused YouTube channel TLDR News has created deeper dive videos.

Listening to voters

News organisations have been trying to gauge voter concerns in many different ways.

Inspired by The Citizens Agenda - a model that allows voters to put questions to candidates popularised by Jay Rosen in the US - Leicestershire's The Great Central Gazette issued a call-out for reader questions which was then put to political leaders.

• Read more: How to use the Citizen's Agenda in your election reporting

BBC News did something similar on a bigger scale in the form of the series Your Voice, Your Vote. Voters up and down the country sent in their burning questions for local candidates. These video submissions were posed directly to local politicians, who answered them in 44 regional episodes.

The Guardian ran a short video series called The View From... asking voters from the UK regions about their top concerns. Tortoise Media continued to do this through its signature Think In sessions.

Sky News got a whole lot more creative with its series Bench Across Britain. It brought the green parliament benches into the set to visually represent what topics people want to see debated in Westminster.

Reaction videos

Reaction videos are a popular social video format where presenters offer live or edited reactions. A lot of the debates around the UK election have provided similar opportunities.

Novara Media, a left-wing partisan media channel, did a live reaction to BBC Question Time special episode with the UK's four main political parties.

PoliticsJoe, the political channel for JOE Media, did a breakdown of the leadership debate between Kier Starmer and Rishi Sunak.

Grilling politicians

Many news organisations stuck to the trusty plan of putting politicians under the microscope. The Sun launched a new social-first politics show, Never Mind the Ballots, pursuing a tough line of questioning towards party leaders.

The News Movement, however, took a new approach with a "different kind of political interview" in The Takeaway, where a more casual interview takes place over lunch. In the case of Labour's Darren Jones, viewers were even treated to a saxophone rendition of Careless Whisper by George Michael.

Liberal Democrats politician Ed Davey also gave an interview while riding a teacup ride at Thorpe Park.

Roblox

The hit online video game, Roblox, allows players to program and play games created by themselves or other users. And BBC News has gotten in on the action.

BBC Wonder Chase was launched in April 2024 setting players mini-games to complete, and it has been engaged with over one million times. It features shows like Match of the Day, Doctor Who, EastEnders, and The Next Step, and characters including the Doctor, Gary Lineker, Hacker T. Dog, Zara McDermott and Louis Theroux.

The UK election will see efforts stepped up, with Larry the Downing Street cat arriving to set players challenges. Familiar faces Laura Kuenssberg, Clive Myrie, and Jeremy Vine have been added to the game.

Top 10s and round-ups

This is really just two honourable mentions. The UK election has been full of gaffes.

Watch Mojo, the masters of the top 10 format, put out a few videos around the UK election. This one rounding up the top 10 cringe moments is maybe the pick of the bunch.

TV critic and broadcaster Scott Bryan also rounded up his best TV moments from the UK election.

Heres a supercut of the 2024 WTF election moments in just 90 seconds. pic.twitter.com/sIQGLR8p7a

— Scott Bryan (@scottygb) July 3, 2024

This article was updated on 3 July 2024 by Jacob Granger

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