Student Journalists, Real Journalism

Gotta prop some of our hardworking student journalists at Simpson, who aren't just doing campus journalism on our student newspaper and radio station at the college. They're out covering the 2008 presidential campaign as freelancers for C-SPAN, the nationwide cable public affairs network.

C-SPAN this summer started using an army of journalists to cover campaign rallies and presidential hopefuls mixing with ordinary folks in Iowa and other important early 2008 campaign states. So when C-SPAN producer Ben O'Connell called me in June to see if we'd be interested in taking part, my colleague Chad Roberts and I put together a team of Simpson students who jumped right in.

So far, Simpson VJs (video journalists, as C-SPAN calls us) have covered campaign events for Republicans Sam Brownback and Fred Thompson and Democrats John Edwards and Barack Obama. And you can watch some of their work online:

• Andrea Kemp, who is editing The Simpsonian student newspaper this academic year, shot this great bit of video of Brownback's campaign event at the Hotel Fort Des Moines in July.
• Nicole Cleveringa, who is the lead copy editor of The Simp this year and writing for the Des Moines Register (along with serving as student body president at Simpson), shot this event of Barack Obama's in Adel, Iowa.
• Mike Wilson made it to the Iowa State Fair to shoot this event with Fred Thompson in mid-August.
• And I, your humble blogger, got behind the camera myself to shoot this event with John Edwards in July.

We're going to be all over central Iowa until the Iowa caucuses in January, so stop back to get the latest on how Simpson student journalists are covering the world of politics.