Covering Debates

This was an article done by Mallary Jean Tenore of Poynteronline. In the article Tenore writes about the conversations and what she observed of journalists at the CNN-YouTube debate in St. Petersburg to get an inside look at how the reporters are getting the campaign news to you.

Tenore finds the crowd at the debate is mostly in complete chaos; trying to get their interviews, photos, and video clips out to their internet readers first. Mark Halperin, editor at large and senior political analyst for TIME magazine, is the first journalist that Tenore watches. Halperin carries his camera with him whenever he's reporting, because there is almost always an opportunity to use multimedia reporting he says.

"If you're not providing all content on all media, you're not really fulfilling your maximum potential," said Halperin.

Samantha Hayes, a national correspondent for CNN Newsource, was walking around holding up her laptop, which she was using to record video of herself reporting at the debate.

"Newsweek's Howard Fineman, who has been doing video interviews with presidential candidates, noted that although reporters are finding new ways of using multimedia to cover the campaigns, there are a lot of other areas that need work," Tenore tells us.

"We spend too much time looking at the roots of their (presidential candidates) character and not enough time looking at how that character has played itself out in their public lives," Fineman said.

Frequently reporters would tell Tenore that a journalist’s main objective when questioning the candidates is to ask the questions they think their readers would ask, as well as some edgy questions.

"What you want is some real conflict among the candidates or you want really tough follow-up questions,” Fineman said. "Otherwise you're not going to get anything."

Later in the article Tenore talks to Kathy Kiely, Washington correspondent of USA Today, who explains her debate story writing process. Kiely says how she can write a whole piece and only 15 inches of what she had written will appear the next day.

"Because our first-edition deadline sometimes falls before lips even start moving, we have to have a setup piece ready to go before the debate starts," Kiely said. "For 9 p.m.debates, we might only have time to drop in a couple of live quotes before wehave to let the story go. Then we do a write-thru in about the middle of the debateand another at the end."

The world of reporting sounds hectic enough, but campaign reporting, whew. Tenore allows a look into how those breaking news stories hit your webpage so quickly and reminds you to appreciate the work that was put in to get it to you.