Election Night Buzz

Two minutes to airtime.

The anchors are reviewing last minute changes to the rundown.

The control room is settling into a mix of calm-before-the-storm and the-storm-is-already-here.

In the digital newsroom, staff from The Montclarion, WMSC Radio, and Wired Jersey are setting up shop, shifting through tweets and reports from around the country. 

The Center for Cooperative Media is preparing to tally how New Jersey votes through a unique partnership with digital journalism brand NJ Spotlight.

Other students are preparing to skype with our partners at Bournemouth University in England, where Montclair State is part of a one-of-a-kind international student project that is covering the U.S election on multiple platforms. Ten seconds to airtime. The students from the Carpe Diem class, who have been rehearsing for this special live broadcast, are counting down the anchors.

Five….

Four…

Three…

Two…

One…

And we’re on the air. 

But not just on campus, not just in Montclair New Jersey, or even just New Jersey, or just the United States. For the first time, thanks to Facebook Live, Montclair’s School of Communication and Media is broadcasting to a worldwide network of students, alumni, and friends of the university. The broadcast is also simulcast on WMSC Radio, and is available to a worldwide audio audience on the I Heart Radio app.  For the next hour, a professional broadcast of field reports, live interviews, and updates from the digital newsroom unfolds, as the students experience the real time adrenaline rush of broadcasting live, where anything can—and often does—happen.

More than 1500 people click on the broadcast from all over the United States: from New Jersey down to Florida and across the country to California. Viewers also tune in from Ireland, Portugal and Macedonia. Facebook comments range from “really cool stuff” to co-anchor Julia Siegel’s grandfather’s observation: “Well done.”

Patricia Piroh runs the Carpe Diem program, and coordinated the student live production: "I’ve been here many years, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen students from the Montclarion, WMSC Radio, WiredJersey, and Carpe Diem come together to work on a project.  What’s particularly great is that students from our various brands interacted and worked together, even though they may have not known each other before this project.  This student and faculty cross-pollination promotes further collaboration and opens the door to many possibilities moving forward."

Shortly before 7pm, the broadcast concludes, and co-anchor Juan Contla, unclips his mike, accepts the congratulations of peers and professors, and takes a single deep breath. There’s no time for a second deep breath, however,  as he sprints from Morehead Hall to Schmitt Hall, grabs an elevator to the third floor, flies into one of the studios, puts on his headset, gets counted down, and begins to co-anchor WMSC’s wall-to-wall election night coverage. He’ll be at it until after 3am, when Donald Trump has clinched the election, and made his victory speech.

The WMSC staff has  mobilized for wall-to-wall coverage, with reporters checking in from campus polling places, a student gathering in University Hall, where hundreds watched big screen results, and the digital Morehead Hall newsroom. Professors from Montclair State’s School of Communication and Media, and Department of Political Science and Law call in all night as the election takes a surprising turn away from Hillary Clinton toward the eventual winner. There are conversations with other college radio stations, and frequent updates to the Electoral College scoreboard.

Two days later, and senior and WMSC Station Manager Contla has had time to reflect on his whirlwind election night experiences:

“Regularly being on the radio gave me confidence to speak and deliver the message we were trying to bring our viewers on TV. I’ve been involved in our radio station, I’ve written for the newspaper, produced for Wired Jersey, and now I’ve been on the Carpe Diem set. I’ve taken advantage of every opportunity and ran with them.  Election night gave me the closest form of newsroom experience that any student can ask for. We aren’t on the scale of any major outlet, but for college media, this was monumental."

One of the reporters that Contla interviewed was an accidental WMSC contributor. Dayonara Link is a senior who found herself on the air purely by happenstance:

“I was walking around the Hoboken waterfront, and my boyfriend pointed to the Javits Center across the river, and mentioned that’s where Hillary Clinton was scheduled to speak.  On the spot, I decided to go there. As an aspiring journalist, I knew this was an historic night—although not the way I thought it would be—and I wanted to collect different interviews and footage and post it on Facebook Live. So I hopped on the PATH train and ran to the Javits Center.”

Soon she was live on WMSC describing her journalistic experiences.

Coordinating all of the coverage and acting as both boss and nurturer to these students is Anabella Poland, WSCM’s General Manager. To her, the nonstop coverage provided three immeasurable benefits:

“Perhaps the most important result of the coverage is that it made our students more engaged in politics and the political process; it gave them a front row seat to a big national event.   Second, it taught them the discipline of doing breaking news for a long stretch without inserting their own opinions. Third, a number of the students told me that what they took away from the experience was not the election results itself but what it’s like to work as a team. This experience took a close team, and made it even closer.”

The students who run The Montclarion also covered the election in real time with a live blog, multimedia news stories posted on the website on election day and for the next two days, non-stop social media coverage that included Facebook live broadcasts  and then an anti-Trump protest and Student Voices spread in that week’s print edition.

The Montclarion’s faculty adviser, veteran journalist Tara George, notes the first-time aspect of this coordinated coverage, saying that “student journalists from WMSC and The Montclarion worked through the night together and independently to produce really innovative election coverage of a kind that I don’t think has been seen at MSU before. WMSC had a head-spinning lineup of guests from all sectors of the campus and more than nine hours of coverage on air and via social media. There’s a lot to be proud of here.”

Meanwhile, the Montclair State University/Bournemouth University collaboration was in full swing; students were writing opinion blogs, posting audio essays and producing video reports. Stories that might just have been done for a class are now being consumed by an informed international electorate. One Montclair student, for example, writes from her perch as a dual U.S-British citizen about Brexit and Trump.

Ann Luce, a senior lecturer in journalism and communication, coordinates the international cooperative program: 

“Working with Montclair was a great experience both for our students and in terms of overall coverage. The collaboration helped keep us on the air for 12 hours in the wee hours of the morn—no small feat! It was a great experience across the board.”

Meanwhile, students of Professor Tom Franklin’s class were broadcasting their own feeds on Facebook live, and contributing to the Bournemouth University effort. Professor Steve McCarthy, who helped produce the election night television special, worked with students who posted pieces to the Wired Jersey site, and other outlets.
Marc Rosenweig, a veteran journalist and broadcast executive, is associate professor and coordinator of the Television and Digital Media and Journalism programs.  He views the election activities through the prism of what it offered the students:

“It’s a great learning experience for our students because it exposes them to creating coverage of one  the most significant events of their lives and prepares them to cover the news on a professional platform in the near future.”

Surveying all of the collaboration and the total output is the Director of The School of Communication and Media, Merrill Brown. He sees what occurred election night through the eyes of someone who has been intimately involved in the planning of the new headquarters of the School of Communication and Media.

Brown says: "Our students’ collaborative election night work represents an inspiring next step in developing an approach to multi-platform news coverage that we will be fully launching this spring in our new School of Communication and Media building.  In bringing together the talents behind our newspaper, radio, digital and video initiatives, the SCM teams demonstrated both how we can create important learning environments while at the same time also produce valuable news coverage for our students and for the University community."

Election night was a precursor to that vision.

Mark Effron teaches courses in video production and journalism in Montclair State’s School of Communication and Media, and is coordinating efforts to create the newsroom of the future in the new headquarters of SCM.