Election Audience Votes, and Web Clobbers Print Elections are full of real-time data and rapid twists and turns, so it's no surprise that audiences flocked to the Web in the recent election and seemed to use newspapers as a secondary source on election matters. In the great unpacking of the 2012 election, the Pew Research Center took a look at how and where voters got their news. As Alan D. Mutter pointed out in his blog, Reflections of a Newsosaur, "the Internet absolutely buried newspapers as the preferred source for campaign news": While newspapers and the Net each were cited in 2008 by approximately a third of Americans as their go-to outlets for political news, Pew found that the number of people in this year's contest relying on newspapers plunged to 27 percent while those using the Web soared to 47 percent. Twitter emerged with a tremendous show of force in 2012, with 31 million tweets about the election posted on Nov. 6, 17 times as many as in 2008. Young voters in particular "watched" the election on more than one screen, with 39 percent of voters between the ages of 18 and 39 consuming television and online coverage at the same time. Newspapers, which have developed a template of coverage over decades, will have to re-examine their approach to elections to remain part of the picture. By the time the average reader opens up a newspaper, she or he knows what happened - often at a very granular level - and will be looking for insights into why things happened the way they did. Newspapers will probably function more as daily magazines in future elections, with deep analysis and deep dives into the back story of the campaign narrative. Of course, newspapers aren't just newspapers anymore. As the Neiman Journalism Lab reported, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal both dropped their pay walls for the event and were rewarded with oodles of traffic. At The Times, traffic was up 75 percent compared with the election in 2008 and The Journal's Web coverage reached 50 percent more people this year than the midterm elections in 2010.