Election Day has always been one of my favorite nights to be a Postie. As both a journalism and political science student, Election Day lets me combine my passions for politics and journalism. I love discussing my election predictions with news reporters and contributing to our live blog with real-time election updates for the second year in a row. Everything taking place on Election Day culminates into our annual Election Edition, and it’s a highly collaborative project that wouldn’t be possible without a large team of reporters, columnists, photographers, videographers, coders, designers and more.
In the weeks leading up to Election Day, our news, projects and opinion staffs began to brainstorm ideas for election features and columns. News reporters interview candidates, write features and prepare stories on local races that they complete once results come in. Columnists research elections and candidate platforms while crafting their own political arguments. Our projects team produces quality long form writing, this year featuring Athens’ favorite orange cat.
But the best part is the energy our newsroom holds every Election Night.
The Post has its yearly Election Night pizza before scattering across our newsroom and Athens to call up winning candidates for comments, photograph the reactions of Athens residents and blog analyses of the results in real-time. The atmosphere of the newsroom becomes electric, buzzing as we all divide and conquer to produce quality reporting on the election results. We hop from room to room to answer questions, work with each other on projects involving multiple staffs and, as a whole, put together the product online and in print this week.
Election Night isn’t just great from an experiential learning standpoint. It also brings us all closer together as a newsroom. While sitting and waiting for election results to come in, we all detail our election predictions, reflect on the day so far and have time to chat outside of the realm of journalism. It’s inadvertently some of the best bonding we do as a staff, and it’s one of the few times we have so many people in the newsroom at the same time working on one goal.
I love to see new members of The Post interact with each other and veteran reporters during this night. Amid a night of chaos, we all come out closer and with hands-on experience, building a product bigger than any one staff at The Post. I’ll never forget the nights spent in Baker 325 until 3 a.m., watching the TV as results pour in, and I’ll always be grateful for all that Election Days have taught me.
Abby Miller is a senior studying journalism and political science at Ohio University and the editor-in-chief of The Post. Have questions? Email Abby at am166317@ohio.edu or tweet her @abblawrence.