I have to be honest, when I first heard that we had to cover the election for project 3, I wasn’t too excited. I know absolutely nothing about politics and find them to be quite boring all together. That being said, it wound up being a tremendous learning experience. I’m lucky to have had the opportunity to witness history, as Tom Corbett became the first Pennsylvania governor not to be re-elected.
This project was completely different than the first two packages I worked on. I feel as though I was able to get more creative with the first few packages. Since we had to profile someone for those, there was more leeway in terms of what angle to take for the story. Last time, Jason and I did our package on a tattoo artist and you can imagine how much different that was than covering the election.
The two of us actually had some trouble on Election Day, just thinking of how we wanted to approach the video. We were in the HUB for a few hours and there was very little traffic there. It became pretty clear that students were not very interested in the midterm elections. Neither of us knew much about the two candidates and figured most students didn’t either, which is why they weren’t coming to the polls.
We decided to do some research on Corbett and Wolf to see how this election could impact college students. When we found out that Corbett wanted to cut spending on education, we were kind of surprised that there wasn’t more intrigue around campus. Our goal was to find out why more students are not keeping up with politics. Luckily, most of the students that we interviewed were very articulate and gave great responses. We then sat down with Russell Eshleman from the College of Communications who used to be a political reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He shed light on how he thinks social media has impacted the political landscape and given that most students turn to Twitter for news, this directly affects them.
All in all, the best part about covering the election was that I was able to educate myself and spark a conversation that not enough people my age are having. Knowing that we only had one day to get all of the B-Roll and footage that we needed gave it a real-world feel to it. That’s what it’s going to be like when we’re out on the field if we end up working in the industry, so there was a lot I was able to take away from this experience. In terms of editing and writing, I actually found it a little bit easier than the first two projects. Hard news is more straightforward and that made it easier for us to put everything together once we shot everything we had to. The improvements I have seen in my work since day one are evident when I look back at the first package. I’ve learned so much in Comm 465 throughout the semester and I’m anxious to see how my final project turns out.