Case Study: Associated Press achieves real-time, county-level Virginia election coverage with Microsoft Power BI

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

The Associated Press wanted a faster, more interactive way to visualize live results for the Virginia gubernatorial primary so its member news organizations could publish local coverage quickly. The AP collaborated with Microsoft and used Microsoft Power BI (with Azure SQL Database and DirectQuery) to explore real-time, county-level election visualizations for web and mobile audiences.

Microsoft Power BI delivered interactive maps and charts fed by an Azure WebJob into an Azure SQL Database, enabling a publish-to-web report that refreshed as often as every two minutes (experimental) and was built and deployed in under two weeks. The solution reduced manual work, at times displayed results faster than AP’s internal systems, supported members such as WTOP in publishing timely local coverage, and scaled to handle the surge in election-night traffic.

Associated Press

Troy Thibodeaux

Data Journalism Editor