Case Study: Associated Press achieves interactive, real-time county-level election visualizations with Microsoft Azure (Power BI)

The Associated Press enhances coverage of Virginia elections with Microsoft Power BI

The Associated Press, a global news cooperative with a long history of election coverage, needed an effective way to visualize live results for the hotly contested Virginia gubernatorial primary so member news organizations could publish timely, local coverage. The AP data journalism team had not planned an interactive visualization for the June 13, 2017 primary but required a fast, reliable solution to handle high traffic and up‑to‑the‑minute reporting.

Working with Microsoft and partners, AP built an interactive Power BI solution backed by an Azure SQL Database and DirectQuery, using an Azure WebJob to pull API data every minute and a publish-to-web report that updated in near real time. Deployed in under two weeks, the responsive maps and charts delivered county‑level results across web and mobile, removed manual processes, met election‑night demand (updating as quickly as every two minutes during testing), and in some cases surfaced results faster than AP’s internal monitoring.

Associated Press

Troy Thibodeaux

Data Journalism Editor