UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — An important midterm election, with races for Pennsylvania governor and U.S. Senate topping a ballot that includes races for the U.S. House of Representatives as well as numerous municipal government positions, provides an opportunity for Penn State journalism students to get valuable hands-on experience — and share election results and stories with people across the commonwealth.
“Pennsylvania is at the very heart of the fight for control of Congress,” said John Affleck, head of the Department of Journalism in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications. “It’s a great opportunity for our students to cover this important moment in our nation’s political life. Additionally, we’ll be hosting journalists from Scotland, which will allow our students to see the events unfold from an outside perspective.”
Those Scottish journalists — two graduate students and two faculty members from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow — will be in State College to cover the election for The National, a newspaper back home. Their visit is the latest example of a growing relationship between the journalism departments at Strathclyde and Penn State.
Meanwhile, as part of an endeavor facilitated by the recently created News Lab at Penn State, several junior and senior journalism majors will be joining a team of reporters from SpotlightPA and Votebeat on Election Day to produce dispatches from across the state.
The six student journalists will work in teams of two and will focus on three specific cities or geographic areas — Erie (Erie County), Pittsburgh (Allegheny County), and Greene County. Each team will file two dispatches an hour for SpotlightPA. Dispatches will be shared directly with the Philadelphia Inquirer for their Election Day blog and with SpotlightPA’s 80-plus partners to use on their live blogs and in their stories.
Maggie Messitt, the Norman Eberly Professor of Practice and director of the News Lab, will be part of a team of editors — with assistance from fellow journalism faculty members Mila Sanina, an assistant teaching professor, and Walter Middlebrook, the Foster Professor of Practice — and review those dispatches before they’re sent to Spotlight PA’s deputy editor.
The award-winning “Centre County Report” will provide a variety of live multimedia and television coverage throughout the day. That begins with a regularly scheduled newscast at 12:30 p.m. and then a half-hour, live special newscast at newscast at 8 p.m. Those programs may be viewed online.
In addition, there will be live, 10-minute cut-ins at 9, 10 and 11 p.m. as well as consistent, regular social media updates (on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter) until 11 p.m.
“I’ve been looking forward to this unique opportunity. It’s a great complement to our regular weekly newscasts,” said Dale Ostrander, a senior who will co-host the television coverage. “We’ve been preparing for this for a while, and it’ll be exciting to share the results and work together. It’s such a team effort.”
Several upper-level journalism courses have plans for practical student experiences as well, including the following:
- Students in the television reporting course will visit a range of Centre County precincts on Election Day to produce on-camera updates about activity at polling places;
- Students in the audio news production class will create radio updates from polling places in Centre County;
- Students in the 400-level reporting methods course will be conducting a survey of preferences expressed by on-campus student voters about the gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races; and finally,
- Students in the editorial and opinion writing course will be writing about the importance of this election and the importance of voting.