Twitter and Fox teaming up to provide social election coverage (updated)

Updated (11/6/2012 at 11:55am PT) with new information about Twitter and Fox’s relationship.

For the presidential election, Twitter is teaming up with Fox News, which will be reporting specifically on Twitter data for the first time during a presidential election.

The two are working closely together to integrate Twitter’s data into Fox’s live election coverage. Twitter’s data is available to any news network, and really anyone, who wants to keep up with the election in quick bursts of information. Twitter representative Rachael Horwitz told VentureBeat that Fox is not getting exclusive data, and that the data is available to all other news organizations. That said, it’s likely that Fox will get a lot of the data up first given that it has specifically reached out to Twitter to form that kind of relationship.  The data includes “state-by-state engagements” and other real-time information that could be interesting if Twitter or Fox include some real-time sentiment analysis of the swing states.

It’s obvious at this point that social media is at the front lines of breaking news, particularly Twitter. News organizations covering the election minute-by-minute will do well to analyze more than just the polls, but that micro-blogs and status updates that come from voters.

In January of this year, we chatted with Fox about its web redesign that was heavily influenced by the election. At that time, the focus was on making it easy to get video and other content across all different kinds of devices. It also created new video experiences for watching the debates, and following different candidates. Now that the election is here, it seems Fox is paying more attention to social media, where we’ll likely see hints of the results before they even come in.

You can see anchor Jenna Lee analyzing the Twitter data live during the election tomorrow.

Jenna Lee image via Fox News