252 ELECTION COVERAGE HU16 covers the 2020 presidential election. story by Zach Bishop As the 2020 political season reached its climax, HU16 was tasked with covering an election night unlike any before it. To ensure the show ran as smoothly as possible, a team of “Live at Five” veterans came up with pre-recorded content, which included interviews with Arkansas politicians, and streamed live updates on-site at the White County election commission office.The teamwas led by producer Abagail Rezentes, director Jordan Crisco, and beat reporter Ethan Brazell. Crisco’s first task was to assign reporters to go and get interviews. Before Nov. 3, Brazell recorded his conversations with six Arkansas politicians. “I got to interview two people running for city council: Chris Howell and Davis Threlkeld,” Brazell said. “I interviewed Rodney Govens who’s running for this house district, I interviewed Joyce Elliot who’s running for the United States House of Representatives, Rickey Harrington who was running for United States Senate against Tom Cotton, and I got to talk with French Hill a little bit too.” After interviews were received and edited, the live work began. “We decided that we could do cut-ins on Facebook and broadcast them,” said associate professor of communication Dr. Ginger Blackstone. “It was very easy to use our existing set up, pump it to Facebook, and have Mark Prior pull up the Facebook page and broadcast it. We were covered on multi-platforms that way.” On the site, the team started off with live updates of polling numbers. “We knew they were going to, at some point, begin the night by reading off the early voting and absentee ballot numbers,” Blackstone said. “They weren’t allowed to announce those numbers until polls closed at 7:30, so there were certain things we had squared away-interviews and other things like that.” The team said their biggest challenge was maintaining the balance between live updates, pre-recorded packages and unscripted reporting. In between live updates, Brazell ad libbed whatever issue was most prevalent at the time. “We would do cut-ins at the top and bottom of the hour; we really used Ethan to drive a lot of that,” Blackstone said. “There were times where we were really stretching Ethan. There was one cut that I want to say was over half an hour, and a lot of it was not scripted.” Brazell wasn’t the only one going off script that night. The whole team had to do a lot off the cuff. “With a live production, you have to be extremely flexible,” Rezentes said. “Something is always going to be different than you expect. Things were changing, and we had to be adaptable.” Crisco echoed Rezentes’s embrace of change. “It’s amazing how even though we have a constant influx of new people and people leaving, we continually get better, and I think that’s a testament to Ginger and Mark and some of the older people who are still here,” Crisco said. “We take what we did wrong and fix it, and keep riding the wave, getting a little better every time.” HU NEWS HEADQUARTERS
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