Nowhere gets more political than a newsroom on Election Night. Fact.
Last week, we finally witnessed the end of the 2016 election. And it sure ended with a bang. More like with a nuclear bomb, but that is besides the point. There were people watching the live coverage on TV while others paid attention to Twitter for inevitable results. Me? I was in the WMLN 91.5 newsroom, helping with the live coverage of the election. Let me walk you through the process.
I, along a slew of others, were crammed in the newsroom in an already crammed radio station. We were given the task to deliver live results of the election. We each had at least 10+ tabs opened to different news websites for results. In between result hours, I would be constantly refreshing electoral maps and Twitter pages, just to see if a red state miraculously went blue. They didn't but I still kept refreshing. During these breaks, we would go back and forth on possible ways for Hillary to win, or discuss on Trump's policies. Every now and then we would nervously laugh about a Trump America. We aren't laughing anymore.
Within the first hour, we were already high on the sugar rush of soda and energy drinks.When we would get results, we would also get frenzy. To make sure we were right and credible, we had to make sure that at least three sources agreed with each other. Now imagine if 8 states delivered results within seconds of each other. Somehow, through yelling at each other and ciphering through sources, we got the job done. The newsroom became a room of political intellectuals.
Before my experience of doing a live Election night, my political knowledge was at a medium. Now, I am a communications major, but I still care enough to read on policies and what not. That being said, I have never been more in tune with the nation's election (and perhaps implosion) than on November 8th, 2016. The newsroom allowed us to speak about politics in a more casually cynical sense. We all joked about both candidates and their views, but through our jokes and poking, we found the holes of their ideologies. We found the holes of America.
There is no other experience quite like it. We, like the rest of the population, watched as states demonstrated their true colors. It was like slow motion really. The anticipation and anxiety of everyone in the news room added onto the prolonged doom of the electoral map. But, unlike the nation, we still carried the duty and responsibility to decipher what the map was telling us and deliver to our on-air personnel. The responsibility came to be heavy once we understood what exactly were we doing. We were notifying to the live commentators, and eventually to our audience, that it was going to be a Trump's America.
However, it was quite the experience. A bunch of us felt that we had the responsibility to see it to the end. Regardless that it was a school night, we stayed in that room till 1:00am. That night made me feel proud that I was a part of a bigger picture, helping a bigger message.
