Screenshot of USC Annenberg Media website.

Election 2016: USC Annenberg’s student journalists deliver

Amidst the chaos and uncertainty of Election 2016 results rolling out on Tuesday night, the student journalists of USC Annenberg Media were focused on one task: reporting the news.

Via multiple platforms, student news crews delivered nonstop, live coverage of the races as they unfolded.

A crew of faculty helped run the show: Laura Davis, Vince Gonzales, Willa Seidenberg, Rebecca Haggerty, Stacy ScholderMatthew LeVeque, and adjunct faculty member Barbara Pierce. Annenberg Fellows Noon Salih, Marc Ambinder and Jessica Perez also guided coverage. 

Professor Laura Davis, Digital News Director of the Annenberg Media Center:  

There were many moving parts — from the Facebook Live broadcasts to radio updates to coverage on the website, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat — and they planned and executed it all beautifully.  

Watch the Facebook Live broadcasts here:

In addition to the Facebook Live coverage — where students monitored comments to engage with our audience and add context — the students pulled off a full ATVN broadcast, incorporating election coverage as results rolled in:

Radio did 10-minute live cut-ins on KXSC at the top of the hour from 6 p.m. through 11 p.m. You can hear them on the radio page

Radio students also solicited short audio clips from college students in every state talking about the mood on their campuses and what other ballot issues were big in their state. The clips were assembled on a map so you could click on the state and hear the audio clip. Here is a link to the map

The students’ coverage on digital — beyond Facebook Live — was a great cross-platform experience. The students live tweeted, continuously updated our breaking news bar, wrote an evolving mainbar and a few sidebars, shared photos on Instagram, made a behind-the-scenes Instagram Story and brought our coverage from around the city and county into our Snapchat Story. Jenn de la Fuente even built us a custom election results map that we featured on our homepage all evening.

Here’s a sampling of the students' work:

Updated 1/12/17: Here is another look at how Annenberg's students covered the election: