English, Media, Politics

Life in a Radio Bubble - Recap of Election Night Coverage

Just a few minutes before midnight, President-elect Barack Obama took the state at Grant Park in Chicago to speak to an electrified crowd. The 44th President greeted the people in the park and around the world with the words, “Hello, Chicago. If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, tonight is your answer.”

At the same time, I opened the door of the radio booth inside the Graduate School of Journalism and took a seat next to the hosts Kelly Ann Senyei and Jamie Jordan. Completely exhausted from the last 50 minutes of live coverage, the three of us missed every single word of this historic acceptance speech, and I for myself could not have cared less.

In January of 2008, I began covering this great spectacle with three weekly blogposts for a German media outlet, hoping in each primary that the underdog would win, and the next primary therefore matter. Back then, I looked at the schedule and would not dare to dream that I would ever write about April 22 and the Pennsylvania primary, much less an party in-fight that would carry on well into the summer.

The climax of all this came last night, with a live four-hour radio broadcast in which I had the great honor to be one of the Senior Producers. Meeting after meeting in the preceding weeks, it dawned on me that this was not only a tremendous challenge but probably a historic night in which a team of three dozen students would have to show flexibility and decision-making on the fly, while not forgetting the intense we had received since our arrival at the school in August.

Starting Saturday, I spent every minute that I was not asleep inside the radio lab with my fellow Senior Producer, Kirk Carapezza. Creating music bumpers and a theme music, going through every produced package and interview. On Sunday and Monday that meant a workday from 9 a.m. to 3 a.m.

Going to dinner way after 10 p.m. and returning to the school afterward became a habit - and a cherished one because I knew that this was why I came to this school and why I deferred my admission by a year.

On Tuesday, the day of the election, I returned to the studio at 9.30 a.m. tired and exhausted from the previous days, but excited about what was to come. The first reporters returned from their morning assignments and tapes from the polling places all around the New York. It was then when I realized that this was really happening. The day we all, and I mean we all journalists, had been waiting for.

It is now hard for me to recollect what happened within the next hours because never have five hours seemed so short. I knew that the new media students at the school had finished their webcast, and that meant for us that we were fifteen minutes away from a four hour marathon that would include live calls to at least 10 different locations in the U.S., live guests in the studio, hours of pretaped interviews and packages, newscasts and updates that were not even produced yet (because that is what a good live show is all about).

When I passed some of the new media students on my way to the studio and realized that I completely forgot about their webcast, I knew that this was not going to be the night I envisioned. There was simply no time to pay any attention to anything else besides our task, and that included following the actual election.

Once the show started and Senior Editor James Sims, Kirk and their team took over; our group started producing a billboard for the 9 p.m. hour, I finalized the playlist for the bumper music, and checked filenames and bitrates.

It must have been within that hour of preparation that I figured out where this night was heading. In the previous days, I had checked every single thing myself, now I had to delegate assignments and had to trust my fellow students to complete them not only on short deadline but within the correct technological requirements.

This was the best part of the night because it demanded complete team effort. Since I had gotten to know almost all the people that were working around me, this was also the easiest task of the night. When you come to a place like this, one of the great benefits is working with the smartest people around, which in addition share the drive and fascination it takes to make a pilot project like this work.

The clock struck 9 o’clock and within a second the MAC computer in the control room went black.

Another joy of live broadcasting is watching everyone go crazy within a matter of seconds - not that any of us needed any more excitement that night.

It took a couple of minutes to fix the glitch, but when the strings signaled the music of our billboard, and our hosts read the first lines, I knew that all the previous days of work had just paid off over and over again.

I remember shaking Dean Gruskin’s hand and pushing him into the studio. I remember telling the hosts that things had changed and they needed to replace this sheet of paper with this one, and to forget about that, and to please read this one first. I remember crawling on the floor of the studio to look for a script that the host had accidentally thrown away, and I remember listening to the show in the editor’s room, realizing that it actually sounded like a radio broadcast.

Part of that was because our hosts had the great talent of looking completely flustered when I would throw another sheet of paper and one additional change in plans at them, but quickly turning around and sounding like nothing ever happened when the Show Director Prune Peromat signaled that their mics where “hot.”

The 45 minutes of Hour 2 just flew by, and within seconds after congratulating fellow Senior Editor Hannah Yi, I realized there was another billboard due in just 40 minutes, and an empty rundown to fill.

I am still amazed at the energy in the room. The Reporter Wrangler’s Afsin Yurdakul and Smriti Rao called their reporters in the field, asking them for another good reason for why they should be live on the show. Desk Producers Katharina Stiegler, Kathleen Brooks and Alison Moodie listened to tape and knew they had to pull and bounce cuts within minutes, and the Senior Desk Editors talked to their In-House Reporters of what stories they could come up with for the next hour.

Unfortunately I never had the time to stop and enjoy this clockwork. If you thought five hours can go by fast, try to imagine what 45 minutes can feel like.

At the end of that, I stood next to Professor West who was writing a billboard script that was supposed to air in less than three minutes.

The last hour of the show can be described as chaotic. There was a time span of about 30 minutes when we didn’t know what we would air in less than 2 minutes. Technical Director Julia Bottles called every possible reporter, sometimes ordering me to dial numbers and telling them to stay on hold. Executive Producer Devin Dwyer stood behind the control room staff and made the type of final decisions that were needed in a time when nothing seemed final.

When we cut away from the live broadcast to air Senator McCain’s concession speech from Arizona, I walked into a small annex next door to catch a breath. Watching McCain for a couple of seconds I realized what had happened. Obama won, and I did not even notice.

Throughout the night I would hear that certain states where called for Obama, and having called this race for myself a couple of weeks ago, it never came as a surprise that he actually won. But I still missed it. I had no clue how Florida went, what exit polls in Virginia were saying, and how many electoral votes were already decided. It was life in a bubble and I told Dean Grueskin in the second hour, “it’s very strange covering an election and not knowing what actually goes on out there.”

Gladly our editors knew what was going on, and that is all that mattered in terms of our broadcast.

After Obama finished his speech, I left the studio and listened from the other side of the door when the final lines of a long night were spoken. The theme music I created three days before faded out and there it was: The end of a remarkable night - that had nothing to do with a victory of a certain candidate.

When I signed up for this I expected this to happen, and when I listened to a 2006 broadcast from the same school, I knew that I wanted to be in the middle of that studio when it all went down. I like reporting and being on the streets, but when we left the building well after midnight and walked the now empty streets of New York, I was glad I chose that spot over any jubilant crowds in other parts of the city.

The next day I slept until 1.30 p.m., checked the headlines online and saw some footage from what went down across the country a few hours prior.

In one sense I was not part of the history that went down that night, but I knew I was part of something bigger personally, something that I would tell my grandkids about and that I would always cherish for the rest of my life.

If you only have 10 months with these incredible people, you try to enjoy it as much as you can, and in these past couple of days, I was able to get an extra dose of it.

Thanks to everyone that was involved, especially the professors and everyone that did not read their names here. I am still blown away by your dedication and your professionalism and I am glad I could be part of it.

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