COM Students Cover the New Hampshire Primary
A busload of students left the College of Communication yesterday afternoon, heading to New Hampshire. Photo by Lauryn Allen (COM’22)
COM Students: Covering the New Hampshire Primary
Check out their multiplatform coverage here
At 12:30 yesterday, dozens of College of Communication students, decked in rain gear and lugging tripods and laptops, boarded buses, ready to cover one of the biggest stories of their burgeoning careers. They were en route to New Hampshire to report on the nation’s first presidential primary of the 2020 election season. The students covered the candidates, issues, victory speeches, and voters in print, video, social media posts, and photographs, bumping elbows with journalists from some of the nation’s biggest news outlets as they prepared stories for the BU News Service, BUTV10, WTBU, and the Daily Free Press.
“On Elm Street in Manchester, it’s a big political parade,” says Peter Smith, a COM senior lecturer in photojournalism. “For someone interested in covering important events and politics, it’s like a rock concert. It’s exciting and a great experience to cover such a big story.”
Lauryn Allen (COM’22) was assigned to photograph Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) for the BU News Service. She described the assignment to BU Today as an incredible opportunity, but also an immense amount of pressure: “She’s a candidate who so many people are watching and who has a serious chance of getting the party’s nomination. I know I’m going to have to step it up and take photos that will earn a permanent place in my portfolio.”
Below, we point you to some of the COM students’ best stories, a list we’ll continue to update as stories come in:
- BUTV10’s special edition Primary Focus, aired live from candidates’ campaign headquarters in New Hampshire as well as from COM’s television studio, delved into the real-time polling numbers, interviews with political experts like David Scanlon, New Hampshire deputy secretary of state, and Horace Small, director of the Union of Minority Neighborhoods. Primary Focus is a collaboration of more than 50 students, spearheaded by BUTV10’s news programs, including Good Morning BU, The Wire, Government Center, and On That Point.
- “Voters across the Granite State came out in droves the weekend before the New Hampshire primary,” this BU News Service photo gallery teases. “Some were dedicated fans, while many were trying to narrow down the pool of candidates before casting their vote Tuesday.”
- President Donald Trump easily won New Hampshire’s Republican primary; on Monday, more than 11,000 of his supporters filled the Southern New Hampshire University Arena to hear him speak. Student reporters were posted outside and spoke to voters in the crowd, asking whether the impeachment trial changed their feelings towards him.
- Reporters covered a town hall meeting in Exeter, N.H., led by long-shot Republican presidential candidate Bill Weld, former Republican governor of Massachusetts, where he discussed Trump, the state of the party, and his love of independent bookstores (the town hall meeting was held at one).
- The BU News Service captured Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) giving a talk at the Rotary Club of Nashua, where she discussed the importance of small businesses, the economy, and infrastructure advancement.
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