A press pack of journalism, politics, design and other students will use a live studio link to crunch counts to keep the General Election fully covered.
Brunel University London students will work through the night to pull together an impressive package of live multi-platform reporting as politicians’ battle for number 10 reaches its showdown.
National press prepare to pounce on Brunel’s Uxbridge campus, the base for three counts in Hillingdon borough where political big guns, John McDonnell and Boris Johnson’s seats are up for grabs.
The 30 students will produce live broadcasts on Facebook, plus publish breaking news, live blogs, results and interviews throughout Thursday night in what will be 2017’s biggest political event yet.
“The students are really excited to have the opportunity to report live from an election count,” said Journalism lecturer, Rachel Sharp. “They all have great skills in multimedia journalism, and are looking forward to testing out those skills in a real live reporting situation. We also have a lot of students that are passionate about politics, so this is such an exciting night for them.”
Amy Harrison, 20, said: “It’s an excellent experience for us, to have a real live event to use all our skills we are learning, including shorthand.”
Amalie Henden, 23, will be a broadcasting anchor on the night. She said: “I’m really looking forward to it, it will prepare me for my future as a journalist. This is exactly what I want to be doing in the future.”
Based in their industry-standard equipped news hub, they’ll have a live video link to Brunel’s Indoor Athletics Centre where counts will be underway for Boris Johnson’s seat in Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell’s seat in Hayes and Harlington and Nick Hurd’s seat in Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner.
Dubbed genews17, the journalism students from the Brunel team will be broadcast news anchors and roving reporters. Politics students will debate head-to-head in round table discussions broadcast on the night, as well as researching, data gathering and commentating along with students from History, Games Design, Film & TV and Intelligence and Security. They’ll publish stories on local news website Hillingdon is Here and also get active across social media. Games Design student, Kaneeze Abbas has created a manga style campaign coverage logo and will look after graphics and animations on the night.
Also on June 8, two Brunel politics and history students will report live from ballot counts across Essex for Sky News. The pair will broadcast a live feed of the count and declaration into the channel’s overnight election coverage. They are among several groups of students from universities across the UK working on Sky’s digital camera project, live in 150 counts across the UK.
“It’s great that we have students from across lots of different subjects working together on election night,” Rachel said. “They all have different sets of skills that complement each other really well. I'm sure we are going to have a lot of fun.”
Follow the students on Twitter @ge17news and find out more about media and communications studies at Brunel here.
Reported by:
Hayley Jarvis,
Media Relations
+44 (0)1895 268176
hayley.jarvis@brunel.ac.uk