The Chicago Tribune estimated that the gimmick cost $300,000 to $400,000. And, ratings-wise, it was worth the expense. As Lisa de Moraes reported in The Washington Post:

CNN’s 13.3 million viewers, garnered between the start of prime time at 8 and the end of President-elect Obama’s speech at about 12:30 a.m., is not only the biggest audience in the cable net’s 28-year history but also marks the first time the cable news network made a clean sweep of all the broadcast and cable networks on election night. Its closest competitor, ABC, logged 12.5 million in those same hours. NBC and CBS lagged with 12 million and 7.5 million, respectively.

CNN’s bid to be election night’s technological frontrunner was, in that sense, successful. But it’s clear (and unfortunate) that the Princess-Leiafication of the evening was a blatant and extravagant way to boost ratings and garner attention—all without adding anything of substance to the broadcast.

According to Ramesh Raskar, an associate professor of media arts and sciences at MIT and a researcher at its Media Lab (he heads its Camera Culture research group), one of the more exciting aspects of this type of holographic technology is that “it allows viewers to be closer and closer to the event.” Raskar says the technical aspects of the hologram pleased him, but notes that he was “disappointed by its being used to essentially disengage [the correspondent, Jessica Yellin] in Chicago from the audience around her,” and wishes that CNN would have used the technology to actually allow viewers to get a better impression of the crowd. “If you think about all the YouTube videos you have of people running into Grant Park and cheering and responding to the speech, I think that needed to be brought in with this sort of transporting technology,” he says. In its quest to incorporate high-tech gadgetry into its broadcast (some of it very good), CNN dropped the ball on questioning why and how it was using some of it.

It’s not just about holograms and Magic Walls

As soon as she got her own show on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow immediately got a Twitter account to alert her viewers to guest line-ups, and made podcasts of the show available on iTunes, where they have regularly been among the most downloaded. (Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that restricts its post length to 140 characters or less—about a line or two of text.) Twitter and podcasts may not be as flashy as a hologram, but, used well by journalists, they can help create a community of loyal and informed viewers.

During the campaign, reporters and bloggers used Twitter to broadcast their immediate impressions of various big ticket events—the conventions, for instance, or the debates. At its best, Twitter is unparalleled as a mode of collecting and dispersing information concisely and efficiently. On the other hand, some journalists developed a decidedly looser Twitter finger: Rachel Sklar, until recently of The Huffington Post, has used Twitter, like many others, for just about everything, from political commentary to airport observations to the random note that Eric Holder has a sexy mustache (“I wonder if Axelrod is jealous”). While the randomness is theoretically refreshing, the frequent and disparate nature of the Tweets can also make the relay of knowledge, when it comes, feel congested. The novelty was in the form, but often, there was little added value beyond that.

Nancy Scola says that “[Twitter’s] not overly useful at a national level” because a countrywide network of Tweeters tends to be too diffused to be effective. But she thinks it has more promise with “local papers, local press”—in Missouri, for example, where TechPresident, in conjunction with a local TV station, used Twitter on election day “to track what was happening in local precincts.”

NPR also joined the effort (called Twitter Vote Report), with its Andy Carvin saying on Weekend Edition: “We only have so many reporters who are able to tackle voting irregularities, and they’re going to be working like mad…[Twitter Vote Report is] a way of spreading the workload out.” These efforts were still somewhat constrained by the tool itself: as a crowd-perpetuated technology, Twitter’s success, even on a local level, requires that a larger percentage of the general American public know what Twitter is and how to access it. While that’s completely achievable, it’s also clear that it will take more time for that to happen.

You still need a good reporter

CNN’s Magic Wall, the tactile multi-screen electoral map that reporter John King employed on election night, worked because King knew how to use it. Watching him zoom in to view results from Lake County, Ohio, without a break in his analysis, it was clear that he had practiced, and was comfortable with using the touch-screen technology; there were no extra movements, fumbles, or showy uses of the map.

Check out Saturday Night Live’s popular spoof of a reporter using CNN’s Magic Wall merely to show off what it could do. (The state of Oregon ended up in the ocean.) Jeff Han, the creator of the Magic Wall, noted in a recent interview with CNET that he wants all new clients to see the SNL skit, which he said relays the message that technology is just a tool, and that what matters is how it is used. “In the wrong hands, it doesn’t work,” he told CNET.