Dividing and conquering

By Maria Ramirez Uribe

As our last event comes to a close, it’s crazy to think how far we’ve come in terms of covering candidates. I remember our first day when our journalism group split up covering Cory Booker and Marianne Williamson and Bill Weld. I had never before covered that style of event or covered a presidential candidate.

Our workflow wasn’t the smoothest, as we were just getting to know each other and our strengths and weaknesses. Our articles’ angles weren’t serving our public to the best of our ability as we were focusing on general coverage as opposed to covering the candidates with college students in our minds. 

As the trip went on, however, we got more comfortable with each other and with covering candidates at their events. 

During our last event, a town hall hosted by Common Cause, we had the opportunity of covering six candidates over the course of three hours. This was not a type of event we had covered before and I was incredibly proud of our team and the way we handled this new challenge.

As soon as we arrived at the venue, our team split up into small groups to cover different parts of the event. Two teams went out to get interviews from the audience and the conference leaders while the other teams took stills and set up our main camera. 

During the event, we had a live blog being updated as each candidate spoke. Because of this, we had one person taking notes and one person updating the blog as each candidate took the stage. This method was incredibly effective and efficient and allowed us to be the first to cover the event.

Not only did we have a written portion, but we were constantly cutting and uploading videos of the candidates’ speeches in order to add multimedia elements to the live updates. 

This form of covering the event was possible because we all knew our roles and were able to use our individual strengths to benefit the team. 

I’m really glad this event was our last one and I think we were able to prove to ourselves how much we’ve grown and learned in such a short time.