Inside News18 Network's Bihar counting-day operation: Ground-fed results hub with 150+ reporters

New Delhi: News18 Network will run a large on-ground operation for Bihar’s vote count on November 14, anchored by a control room that is fed directly by reporters at 46 counting centres across 38 districts. 

The network said its “Live Results Hub”, staffed by more than 50 editors, will act as an end-to-end data collection, processing and dissemination centre, pushing booth-level inputs to TV and digital in real time.

The hub is built to prioritise first-party numbers, where the editors reconcile inputs from counting centres with desk verification before publishing. 

The network describes this as India’s only ground-fed media election results hub, refined over 21 years of operations to improve both speed and accuracy.

The pitch leans on scale and precedent. On November 8, 2015, CNN-IBN and IBN7, now CNN-News18 and News18 India, called the Bihar result for the Grand Alliance at 10:03 am, about an hour before rivals, as reported by BestMediaInfo at the time. 

Network18 also stresses a long-running preference for field reporting over agency feeds, placing reporters at each counting centre to reduce latency and error.

The regional backbone has grown since Network18 acquired ETV’s language portfolio in 2012. ETV Bihar/Jharkhand was rebranded as News18 Bihar-Jharkhand on March 16, 2018, and the group now cites a language footprint that spans 14 regional channels across 26 states in 15 languages.

In April 2016, then IBN News Network CEO Avinash Kaul told BestMediaInfo that the group was reinvesting in news gathering to move away from “studio journalism” and put resources “on the ground on almost all big stories” so it could go deeper on coverage.

For Friday’s count, the network will run grand studios outside the Bihar Assembly and says it has lined up senior political leaders, psephologists and commentators. 

Twelve anchors – Kishore Ajwani, Amish Devgan, Rubika Liyaquat, Prateek Trivedi, Aman Chopra and Pankaj Bhargava among them – will front coverage alongside more than 150 reporters and video journalists, supported by stringers “in every village, including the homes of Bihar’s biggest newsmakers”.

The network says the format is designed to publish fast without trading off verification, with granular constituency checks routed through the hub. Graphics and trend trackers will update alongside expert analysis as seat leads change through the day. 

Coverage begins at 6 am on November 14 on News18 India and across the News18 Network, with rolling programming through the day.