Student Journalists Take Debate Reporters to School on Social Media

When thousands of journalists from across the world descend on campus for a presidential debate, what's a scrappy student startup to do if it wants to stand out?

Long Island Report is a two-year old student outlet at Hofstra University, home to Tuesday's presidential debate as well as a renowned journalism/communications program. LIR's debate coverage is competing not only with the thousands of journalists who've just arrived on campus, but also with the Hofstra Chronicle and WHRU, the university's decades-old newspaper and radio station, respectively.

The key to Long Island Report's strategy for covering the debate? Instant online updates and constantly fresh content delivered primarily through social media.

"We only got two students in credentialed for the debate, so we suddenly realized we had a mountain to climb and few people to help us climb it," said Kelly Fincham, Assistant Professor at Hofstra University and the Report's faculty advisor. "So we thought we need to use social media as crowdsourcing and have people reporting via social media."

How exactly are the Report's student journalists using social media?

First, they're using Facebook in what Fincham considers "a very strange way" — strange in that it's unique. 156 boots-on-the-ground reporters are assigned to a Facebook group, where they're free to post status updates, photos and video of the action on campus. Only two of them have credentials to get close to the debate, while the rest are covering the action elsewhere around campus.

The result is something like this:

Once those posts are on the Facebook group, the editorial team working at LIR headquarters inside Hofstra's communications building can pick and choose the best posts to include in Storify collections posted to LIR's website.

"It's so easy for the students, they have the pictures, they can upload them and add a caption," said Fincham. "So you can say we have a team of 156 journalists working on this story — you just can't see any of them."

SEE ALSO: Watch the Hofstra Presidential Debate Live Stream

Second, the Long Island Report's two credentialed reporters are firing photos, tweets and videos from their mobile phones to be picked up by Thomas Uddo, the managing editor. Uddo, a graduate student, is spending the day taking content from those reporters, as well as the Facebook group and outside tweets, for building stories quickly uploaded to LIR's website.

"Today is kind of a hectic day, we're basically doing on-the-fly reporting," said Uddo. "We have two people at the media filing center now, relaying back media, images, anything they can get and we're compiling that into stories."

Students get ready for their close ups. #hofdebate twitter.com/AlexiKnock/sta…

— Alexi Knock (@AlexiKnock) October 16, 2012

@hofstratoday Inside the media center at @hofstrau. 200,000 feet of cabling runs through this building. #hofdebate twitter.com/chrismlanglois…

— Chris Langlois (@chrismlanglois) October 16, 2012

All that fresh content helps LIR's staff keep the webpage looking new throughout the day. That's a clear advantage over the other Hofstra student outlets, whose homepages aren't prominently featuring debate coverage at all. It also distinguishes them from the large media organizations on campus, which often take longer to upload and post social content.

"We've been in charge of curating Storify posts going on the web, compiling anything #HofDebate, #Debate, pulling it in," said Mike Stainkamp, associate managing editor at LIR and graduate student at Hofstra. "YouTube videos, tweets, pictures. Pulling it in, crediting whoever's doing the work, gathering more information and keeping our site as updated as possible."

Should student journalists be learning how to use social media to tell stories? Share your thoughts in the comments (Full disclosure: Fran Berkman, managing editor at Long Island Report, is also an intern at Mashable).

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