PLU students work election night

It might have been a sleepy election this year, but for some ambitious PLU students election night 2013 was a night to remember.

More than a dozen students from PLU’s communication program worked election night for the News Tribune, KOMO and KCPQ. They produced online content, helped with data entry and enjoyed rubbing elbows with news professionals for the night. This is the sixth year  communication students have worked for local media outlets during election night.

Thomas Soerenes ’14, who worked election night at KOMO-TV, said students received studio tours and met with the news anchors. Lina Aas-Helseth ’14, who spent the night at KOMO worked mostly with data entry and live tweeting.

Erica Hill, news director at KCPQ, said she appreciated having the students on hand to help out. “They were great as usual,” she added. “Hopefully they had a good experience, too.”

Two students, Valery Jorgenson ’15 and Cassady Counter ’14, worked the night at various sites for the News Tribune and added their accounts of the night’s activities to the News Tribune Political Buzz blog. “It was pretty successful for us considering it was a slow election year,” Jorgenson said.

Matt Misterek, Team Leader and student supervisor at the News Tribune, said the Tribune was glad to have the students contributing on election night. “They did well, especially on the early tweets. We retweeted a lot of their info.”

Misterek commented that next year would probably be more exciting. Of course, the students are anxious to do this again.