Election Night! Reporting for The Cincinnati Enquirer I: Video Transcript

Ronnie Albritton [senior, English/Creative Writing and Journalism majors]: I was a roving reporter for the Enquirer. I was down in Butler County — Monroe, Sharonville, and in the area. It was really fun to go around and talk to random strangers about how they voted.

"I noticed that everything was just extremely uniform for this election. There were very few problems in Butler County; everything was getting in on time. There were one or two machines that were acting up but they were resolved immediately.

"It was really exciting. I was going around tweeting about everything. So I'm not a big social media person even though I am a college student. I think I did most of my tweeting for the Enquirer than I've done in my entire Twitter® life, and so it was just really fun seeing my tweets retweeted, and having media members reply to my tweets and ask questions about how things were going.

"I updated my Facebook© status and told everybody, 'If you want to know more about Butler County you can follow me on Twitter,' and I got a couple of messages from some old high school teachers who said they were very proud of where I was going and that they'd like to see me in this kind of field and that's where I should be. Overall it was just a really, really good experience.

"I hope to move back to Chicago and write for the Tribune. Working with the Enquirer has not only given my resume a great boost but personally, I now know about time management for reporting, how to interview people better, how to do web clips, how to do video, what questions to ask, how to push for answers, how to dig a little deeper, and how to report a little harder.

"I got all that experience, not because I was in the classroom, but because I had that actual on-the-field experience, because I had an editor telling me, 'You wrote this wrong;' 'This is how you actually do it;' 'This is who you want to talk to;' 'Don't go to the bottom, go straight to the top, or else you'll never get there.' You have to be hard working and that’s really what I learned in this class.

"I was very afraid to take this class [JRN 421: Capstone in Journalism] because I hate politics. I hate politics so much. I've never been interested. This election alone I didn't really care who won because in my opinion I don't see how one man can change the entire nation. We're a free world and one man can't do that alone. To be politically savvy and to devote yourself so much to politics just doesn't seem logical to me and until it gets there I really don't care.

[November 2012]