Paula Poindexter on Historic Election and Upcoming Visits to mynews@school classrooms

The 2008 Presidential Election is now in the history books. The election of the first African-American President was a major reason this election made history but it wasn’t the only reason. The 2008 Presidential election also was historic because it was the most expensive ever and for the first time since the implementation of a public financing system after Watergate, a Presidential candidate bypassed public funds and spent $650 million to his opponent’s $85 million publicly financed dollars.

This campaign may also go down in history for its use of the Internet to the max, from mega-fundraising to e-mail and text messaging and Facebook and MySpace and YouTube and Twitter. The roller coaster ride that the big issues took may also be historic, with dramatic shifts from the Iraq War to energy to the meltdown of the economy, which may have been the real October surprise. Finally, this election may go down in history as not only the most exciting but also the one that re-connected young people with this most important civic responsibility.

I hope you had great Presidential Election discussions in your classroom. A special thank you to Paul Rials at LBJ, Mark Webber at Austin Jewish Academy, and Vilma Cajigas at Ann Richards School for posting their classroom discussions on Presidential Election news coverage. For those of you who haven’t posted at all or only once, please commit to posting during the remaining few weeks of the program. Communicating what’s happening in your classroom with the newspaper is a very important component of the mynews@school program. If you’re still having trouble posting, please send me an e-mail and I’ll post for you. Or from now through December, assign one of your groups the responsibility of posting or sending me an e-mail, which I will then post to the blog.

If you take a look at the weekly activities distributed during the kick-off, you’ll see that now is the time for a Statesman reporter or former journalist, now turned UT Journalism Professor or Ph.D. student, to visit your class. Last week, journalists and journalism professors/Ph.D. students met at the Statesman to discuss visiting your classrooms. The assignment sheet for classroom visits was e-mailed this morning and the activities for the Week of November 10 are below.

I have also asked the journalists and journalism professors/Ph.D. students to blog about their visits to your classrooms. But we also want your students to become Citizen Journalists for a day and blog about the visits, which brings us to another journalism fundamental: Be prepared. Just as Scouts must be prepared so must journalists so they can fully and accurately report a story. That’s why I asked Statesman reporter and blogger Corrie MacLaggan, whom you met at the kick-off to, give us some pointers on being prepared when covering a press conference or interviewing a newsmaker. Some of Corrie’s tips will help your students prepare for their guests so they can cover the visit as a Citizen Journalist, then post it at http://mynewsatschool.blogspot.com/. It would also be terrific if your students would take a photo of their guest journalist and post it with their citizen journalism story. Jacie has posted instructions on how to upload a photograph on the blog.

Finally, please don’t forget that you and your students are invited to hear Michele Norris, NPR host of “All Things Considered,” November 20, 7 p.m., AT&T Center Ballroom, 1900 University Avenue. The program is part of the Mary Alice Davis Distinguished Lecture in Journalism and presented by the School of Journalism and College of Communication.