On Tuesday, for the first time in more than 20 years, Jim Acosta, a former CNN stalwart, will not be working for a mainstream television network on election night.

Acosta, who left CNN last year after nearly 18 years at the network, is putting on his own live broadcast at the University of Virginia that will air on YouTube and his Substack platform.

And in a sign of the times, Acosta will be joined for the broadcast, hosted by the university’s Center for Politics, by another star of linear television – Katie Couric, a former Today show co-host. (Don Lemon, another CNN alum and converted new media player, may also drop by, Acosta said.)

“If folks are looking for fresh faces and a different way of doing this kind of coverage, I think it’s going to deliver that,” Acosta said.

Acosta said he will be doing his best Steve Kornacki impression, giving analysis using an interactive, touch screen battleground map just like the NBC News data guru. “Yeah, I’m going to have to go to J Crew and get some new khakis.”

Rashida Jones, who serves as chief executive of Piers Morgan’s media company Uncensored, predicted that Tuesday’s midterms will come to be remembered as “the content creator election”, when independent journalists hosting streaming broadcasts give traditional networks a run for their money.

Jones was running one of those television networks, MSNBC (now called MS Now), during the 2024 presidential election, a role she held for four years. She is working to expand Morgan’s company by launching new shows and verticals beyond the “Piers Morgan Uncensored” streaming broadcast, which has about 4.5 million subscribers on YouTube.

The plan for election night is a several-hour-long live show hosted by Morgan from Washington DC, part of a three-day stint broadcasting from the US capital city.

“Our focus is going to be making sense of what’s happening in real time,” she said in an interview. “People aren’t coming to us because they’re looking for how this part of Michigan voted. It’s more the big picture themes and takeaways. Ultimately by the end of the night, people care about where did we land, less about the individual races.”

Jones said that traditional television networks will be facing more competition than past election cycles. “If I’m a network that’s got a guy at a board and a ticker at the bottom, and I just assume people are going to come, I don’t know that that’s baked in and that’s a given this cycle. And I think what we see [on Tuesday] will be on a smaller scale what we see for the general election … I think it’ll be the content creator election.”

Scott MacFarlane, a veteran reporter who resigned from CBS News in March seeking “some independence”, joined the progressive MeidasTouch network as its chief Washington correspondent and will be co-hosting its live election broadcast.

MacFarlane says the streaming show will lack the bells and whistles of a traditional television election broadcast, which is the point. “There will be no teleprompters and no scripts,” he said. “It’s straight to the point, direct, conversational and heavy on original reporting.” He added that “dramatic theme music and theatrical presentations would miss the moment”.

Still, many millions of Americans will be watching a traditional television network – or their streaming off-shoot – to keep tabs on the elections. On election night 2024, an estimated 42.3 million viewers watched television coverage – though viewership is obviously lower for non-presidential years.

“There are more places than ever for people to get their news and information, but there’s no place that has the depth, the scope, and the breadth that NBC News has,” said Hallie Jackson, an NBC News anchor, who is penciled in for nine hours of live coverage as part of the network’s election team, along with Savannah Guthrie, Tom Llamas and Kristen Welker behind the desk (along with Kornacki).

Jackson said the key to election night is hydration, and a regimen of healthy eating that she began last week. “You have to pace yourself. You have to stay hydrated. You have to have a secret pack of M&Ms for your blood sugar that you can come back to every hour.”

Seni Tienabeso, vice-president of ABC News Live and Specialized Units, said the network has planned for a seven-hour-long broadcast, but could go much longer if a key call – perhaps for control of the US Senate or House – is on the horizon.

Asked how much effort is put toward the traditional television broadcast compared with digital and social media offerings, ABC News executives said the network is fully integrated. “For us, it’s about reaching the audience where they are,” Tienabeso said. “We don’t leave any of those arenas as secondary.” (The network’s coverage will also be aired on its ABC News Live digital channel, on Hulu, and on the Disney+ streaming service.)

Like most major networks and news organizations, ABC News relies on election results from the Associated Press – as well as a new voter survey conducted by the polling firm SSRS – to help make projections about key elections. Those decisions are made by a desk that is “holed off” from the rest of the newsroom, Tienabeso said, and is not primarily focused on beating rival networks. “We don’t pay attention to what competitors are doing,” he said. “Our decision desk makes the decision when they feel comfortable with their analysis of the race that they’re covering.”

On Tuesday, viewers watching CNN will be able to see the network’s decision desk in action, and will also have access to a new tool called CNN Sightline that will give insights into how a contest is leaning, based on both data and demographics. “I think it’s probably more transparency than we’ve ever had,” said David Chalian, CNN’s political director and Washington bureau chief.

CNN’s decision desk makes calls when they have at least 99.5% confidence that a certain candidate will win. “Speed is not part of that at all,” he said.

“In a time when voter confidence in elections is something that we constantly look at and is called into question, it only ups the seriousness of purpose with which we take this mission in projecting races,” Chalian added.

Chris Stirewalt, who serves as political editor for the cable network NewsNation and anchors the weekly show The Hill Sunday, said he doesn’t think that Republicans will be happy with the election results. He said that early returns from Ohio will be a good indication of whether “the rout is on” for Democrats.

Stirewalt is no stranger to election night, having been part of Fox News’ decision desk for several cycles before leaving the network in 2021. He said he values the finality of the process: “The conversation goes on and on and on, and then it’s over. And you count, look at the scoreboard, and then it’s done. I love that.”

While Acosta is best-known for his television work, he said he doesn’t miss CNN and is happy to be “starting something at the beginning” by working in creator-driven media. “And that’s kind of the exciting part of it, because who knows where this thing is going to take us?”