The Globe hosted a live election recap special at 10 p.m. on election day. The show, broadcast on 91.1 The Globe and their YouTube channel, was their first crack at live television. Alyssa McDonald, senior broadcasting major, and Kate Bodiker, junior communication and writing double major, served as television anchors, with Tyson Miller, senior journalism major, Lily Herrera, junior broadcasting major, Kyle Hufford, associate professor of communication, and others playing key roles in the production process.
The YouTube description reads:“For the first time ever, 91.1 The Globe will be going live with election coverage. We’ll focus on local elections the big networks will likely skip over. Globe News will break down the local Elkhart County races and give you the reactions from our community.”
The broadcast’s main purpose was to deliver and comment upon the results of Elkhart County polls. However, results from these polls were delayed until Thursday. The newscasters had to pivot, and fast.
Luckily, the breadth of their coverage of polling went beyond the vote numbers. Pre-recorded segments included a look at past voting and trends, interviews with voters expressing the issues they cared most about, and an interview with Chandler Buchfeller, resident director at GC, who served as a poll worker, among other segments.
Also, results for statewide elections, such as the Senate, governor, attorney general and House of Representatives were mentioned on the broadcast.
Smooth transitions between differing segments of the show masked the stress and determination that was taking place off-camera.
“During the show I was so focused on not messing up,” Miller said. “I was in a total panic. Cutting it and just trying to orchestrate this whole thing live was one of the most adrenaline inducing things ever. I was terrified the whole time.”
The live process included updating the teleprompter during breaks with new numbers, and adding content when the county polls fell through.
“We would kick it to these pre-recorded packages,” Miller said, “or these breaks where we had three minutes. And so Lily is sitting next to me and she’s updating the teleprompter script with updated numbers.
“And then we had to totally exit out of the teleprompter and go back in to refresh the page, so there were a couple times where we went back live and they
didn’t have their teleprompter
yet, so they just had to kind of [vamp]. Stuff like that they handled like total pros, even though they had never done it before, so I was really impressed with that aspect.”
The special involved more preparation than normal. According to Hufford, “pretty much everyone on the Globe staff was involved in some way, either producing, pre-producing some packages beforehand or doing stuff the night of.”
In spite of a few hiccups, the broadcast was a successful first foray into live television.
“It went better than I thought it was gonna go,” McDonald said. “I was ready for a lot of road bumps and a lot of, like, oh my gosh, we’re just gonna go to commercial and figure it out and ad lib when we come back. But it actually ran really smoothly. And even despite not getting the results, we still managed to put together a quality show.”
