When we were planning our election night coverage, we looked at the newscasts from this semester with the most engagement on the Annenberg Media Youtube channel. We saw that they shared two common themes: USC and student voices. The two See It Live newscasts, USC Football is Back and Zoom Fatigue, had the highest audience engagement compared to the other shows posted on the Annenberg Media channel this semester.
In that vein my co-producer Jillian and I wanted to create an election night coverage plan that fully incorporated the voices of students across the nation. Since this presidential election was an opportunity for a lot of first-time GenZ voters to gauge how much impact their votes would have on a national scale, Jillian and I wanted to capture that sentiment. This came in the form of including student correspondents from Florida and Washington, D.C and interviews with students in key battleground states such as Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina.
The 2020 presidential election was an event that every single large media organization would cover and while each of these organizations had better financing, equipment, and manpower, one advantage that the Annenberg Media news team had was that we are primarily composed of students. It’s much easier for a student to connect with other students. The people working on our shows generally have friends who have friends who are politically active or located in other key swing states. These voices mattered and it was much easier for us to find and include them.
This idea of reaching out and representing student voices was first proposed by our faculty advisor and teacher Stacy Scholder, who has pushed for the student perspective in every one of our broadcasts. She always talks about the importance of the student angle and student voices, and I’m glad we were able to shape our show around that idea. While we never truly got to air some of the voices we were able to acquire, the vision we had before our unfortunate technical demise was one that I am still proud of.
On the note of the several technical failures and challenges we had on election night, I can only really say that I am frustrated. Weeks of reporting, more than forty guests, and the combined work of about twenty volunteers will never see the light of day because of technical problems completely outside of my control. While we were finally able to air a live two-hour show, mostly due to our amazing team located in the media center, I will always know that it wasn’t even a fraction of what we had planned.
Yet our push to cater to an audience we know and want to serve is a skill that I will always be able to take away from this experience. While I view this night as one with many failures, I do not regret all the effort that went into it.
And on that note I would like to end by saying that many people find it ironic that our media center broke down in the midst of this pandemic. True irony would have been if everything had gone according to plan during this disaster of a year.