Here's a recipe for how to cover local elections. Take a bunch of bright and eager journalism
students. Give them two weeks to fan out across the city and come back with multiplatform stories
on issues as diverse as creating bike-only roads,
spending almost $30
million on a dog pound and treating Vancouver's
sewage.
This is what the first-year students at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of
British Columbia did for their final big assignment of the semester. The stories were published a
few days ahead of Vancouver's local elections on November 15 on our student publication, TheThunderbird.ca.
Following the Election
Election news is one of the main staples of journalism, so having a vote on our own doorstep
provided a great learning opportunity for the class. For this assignment, the students each had
to find, research, report and produce a news story.
But they also have to come up with a sidebar that would complement their main piece, and consider
what format this should take. This reflects our multiplatform approach in training graduate
students to work across different media while at the same time maintaining quality content. We
all know what a challenge that can be, even in the newsroom.
Many of the students are comfortable with technology and eager to experiment. But this is not
just about adding video or audio to a story because you can. Students are taught to consider how
using multimedia can enhance their journalism, making critical decisions about why one form of
media works better than another to tell a particular story.
When student Alexis Stoymenoff wrote about the mayoral candidates singing at an event, she also
posted short clips of
the performances. The videos enhanced the written piece by allowing readers to see what the
story was all about.
Another, Brandi Cowen, looked at how students new to the city were excluded from the local poll,
producing a map showing different
voting rules across Canada. This provided an easy and intuitive way to examine what could
have been a rather dry written piece.
Unraveling City Politics
Despite all the new ways to inform readers about civic issues, some basics remain. Students can't
forget that, no matter what tools you use to tell a story, the most important thing is to do the
legwork to make sure that the underlying story is accurate. The students still had to research
the local political scene, a task especially daunting given that many of them are from outside
Vancouver and have only been living in the city for a few months.
Getting a grounding in local politics was key to this assignment, as this West Coast city has its
own peculiarities. National parties aren't represented on a local level. Instead there are
Vancouver-only parties. And local councilors are not elected according to city district. Rather,
the ten candidates with the most votes overall are elected.
Therefore it was important to have faculty on hand who could help guide the students.
Fortunately, our Canwest Visiting
Professor for this semester is Vancouver Sun columnist Miro Cernetig. As a regular
commentator on city politics, he brought considerable knowledge and connections to the classroom.
He was instrumental in persuading the premier of British Columbia, Gordon Campbell, to talk to
the students about the political
issues in the province.
Still, it proved hard for students to gain, in just a few weeks, the sort of understanding of
local politics that a city reporter develops over years. Our advice was simple: Keep asking
questions. Sometimes the hardest part of being a journalist is admitting that they don't know
something, or don't quite understand it.
As budding reporters, it is understandable that a student might be concerned about appearing
ignorant. But there is nothing wrong in pressing for a clearer explanation and asking for more
details. Curiosity and perseverance pay off in the end.
Less is More
In the end, the students learned that not every story needed a multiplatform approach. Learning
how to use multimedia to successfully tell a story sometimes involves learning when not to use
multimedia. It's not about adding audio or video just because you can.
One challenge the students faced was working on stories that were not going to be published for a
couple of weeks. Many started their newsgathering by attending debates between candidates or
election-related events in communities. But the spot news generated by these events would be
woefully out of date by our publication deadline. Instead, we urged the students to look at the
issues that can come out of these events, and find the stories that brought the topic to life in
a topical and relevant fashion.
Our aim was for the students to produce local stories on issues that were largely absent from the
day-to-day coverage of the campaign in the mainstream media.
As a result, we ended up with a wealth of content. For example, at one of the mayoral debates,
neither candidate was willing to commit funds to the Outgames due to be held in Vancouver in
2011, at a time when the city was spending millions on the 2010 Winter Olympics.
Student Magally Zelaya used that as the starting point to look at the reaction
from Vancouver's gay community, which prides itself on its economic and cultural significance
to the city. For this story, we decided that the most effective way to enhance the main story was
a Q&A on the Outgames,
rather than try to use multimedia just for the sake of it.
Another, Brent Wittmeier, reported on the debate over building
homes in church parking lots and also chose text for the sidebar. Even in a multimedia
medium like the web, sometimes plain old text may be the best way to enhance a story.
For the students, the local elections offered an opportunity to take their skills out of the
classroom and apply them in a professional setting. It gave them a grounding in the politics of
the city and a way to showcase their multiplatform journalism. But it was also about making
decisions about using multimedia and thinking critically about how best to tell the story.
Alfred Hermida is an online news pioneer and journalism educator. He is an assistant
professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, the University of British Columbia, where he
leads the integrated journalism program. He was a founding news editor of the BBC News website.
He blogs at Reportr.net.
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Recommandations
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and reject those that you are not interested in
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