photos and design: Emma Thompson
Polling places swing their doors open early in the morning and hundreds of people scramble through after awaiting many months to cast their ballots. However, the broadcasting team, The Juice, scrambles through the doors of the school to prepare for a 12-hour news coverage event of election day.
On Nov. 3, broadcast students gathered together and conducted one of the longest live stream events that the school has ever done, going from 12:00 p.m. to 12:00 a.m. The stream consisted of many news packages and content that entertained viewers and kept them updated throughout the day.
“We had live 12-hour coverage of election day and election night. During the day, we visited polling places to check on voter turnout and students in the class made pre-recorded packages on election predictions, interviews with candidates and polling,” live stream head and senior Kylie Hanson said.
Projects like these aren’t just planned overnight: they take a lot of time, commitment and patience to pull them all together successfully. Broadcast students worked especially hard to plan for this event and make sure that the night went as planned.
“We’ve been preparing for this show for over a year now. It was our idea to do this last school year, and at the beginning of this school year, we really started organizing our thoughts and turning them into a tangible show. We created a 12-hour schedule of things to air, gathered a large crew with different jobs to help us, and we researched a ton of relevant news to share this election,” Hanson said.
The night was split into two parts, consisting of interviews from professional sources, the school’s opinion on the election and many other packages that were informative and entertaining to viewers. Different teams of people went out during the live stream to add on to the stream as well.
“The first six hours was a lot of content; it was news packages dealing with different pieces of the election. Chloe Hover had a team, and she went out to a bunch of different poll sites and interviewed people, got a b-roll of it, then she came back, ran to the computer to edit and started running it. We had a data team in here anywhere from about three-10 people who had all the news stations up, and they were running content as the day went on.
At 6 p.m., when we started the new stream, no one was in the building. It was unreal though; the polls started to come in. We had a live updated map, and they really just broke down each state, piece by piece. They did a great job of remaining objective,” broadcast teacher Brian Nicola said.
This event was not just new to viewers, but the entire Juice staff as well. The live streams done before were mainly shorter and their purpose was more entertainment based; this live stream required much more work.
“This show is a lot different than anything we’ve done in the past. The Juice usually does live news every morning, live sports, and every year a live telethon that lasts all day. Besides the telethon event, we’re very used to broadcasting for shorter amounts of time, so doing a 12-hour show was a new adjustment for a lot of us,” Hanson said.
Different jobs were assigned to each individual student in an effort to make the night run as smoothly as possible. Each job performed was vital to the success and quality of the show.
“Everyone was doing different jobs each hour. I was floor director most of the night, which entailed fixing camera shots, communicating with the technical director and the anchors. Of course, there are things we could have done better for next time like having more packages, but overall it went very smooth,” junior broadcast student Abby Rhyan said.
Live stream viewers watched this on a variety of different streaming platforms such as Facebook and Youtube. This variety allowed more viewers to tune into the event.
“I’m really happy with the work they put into it. I’m astounded they pulled it off, and of course in 2024 we will do it again. Throughout the course of the day, we probably got 1000 total viewers, I heard from a lot of people it was really exciting,” Nicola said.
The election was intense, but The Juice didn’t let this interfere with its goal. Broadcast students brought 12 hours worth of education and entertainment to all, wrapping up election day in a worthwhile way. To watch the live stream or other streamed events, visit OOHS Juice Student News on youtube.
