Sir Robert Worcester is the founder of MORI polling, also half of the research group Ipsos MORI. He wanted to ask a room filled with journalists and media people “Why does nobody know how to calculate a swing measure but everyone uses that language?”

A swing is the amount of people out of 100 who switch their voting preferences.

A visit to The British Polling Council should be a legal requirement for anybody tasked with explaining voting behaviour.

Some top tips top remember when covering election polls.

• Watch the share and not the lead
• Watch the fieldwork dates
• Watch what’s happening
• Watch scepticisms
• Media act as gospel
• Politicians taking notice of the polls

More people are generally interested in the Elections but can the media continue to build on that momentum.

Twitter is the fastest way to break news but who is actually online?

In our online and connected world, we should not forget that 3 in 4 over 65 are not online and the grey vote has twice as much voting power as younger people. The numbers are not stacking up in terms of politically active online users.

There seems to be a huge lack of political information at the local level many due to local news providers going out of business or consolidating their interests.

Social media is where the conversation happens but it is not the conversation. The real political conversations still happen in the places that they always have done.

The political campaign is about reaching the target audience not about reaching journalists so campaigns can by-pass the media so the message is un-mediated.

Are we paying attention to data protection as online campaigns hold onto more email addresses and plan to hold even more in the future?

The political reporting of the general election was based around the performance of the leaders debate, the exit polls and how the debate would affect politics. The reporting was about trying to expose the flans in the politicians rather than addressing the issues between each party.