While the 1,000-occupied spin room at the Philadelphia Convention Center for Tuesday’s historic debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump was mostly bustling with the national and international news elite, some student journalists found their way to carve out a piece of the history for themselves.
Micheal Dent and Alexa D’Amato are student journalists from Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York in town covering the debate for their college radio station WRHU 88.7 FM.
The station has been named the College Radio Station of the Year four times at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Marconi Radio Awards and is the exclusive radio home of the New York Islanders.
“The most interesting thing that we saw was just the contrasting views,” Dent, a junior journalism major and the news director for WRHU, said of his time in the spin room.
While Dent and D’Amato produced multiple audio segments on the debate from local opinions to student reactions, they said the most exciting part of their trip came when they got a chance to interview campaign surrogates in the spin room after the end of the debate Tuesday night.
For D’Amato, who had previously covered the New Hampshire primaries, the step up in the profile of the event was noticeable and had her expecting to feel overwhelmed going into the day.
“I thought I was gonna be really overwhelmed, but … I knew that I had a great support system and that I was gonna figure [everything] out,” D’Amato said.
After the debate ended around 11 p.m., dozens of surrogates representing the candidate’s campaigns flooded into the spin room and were quickly surrounded by walls of reporters, making it hard for smaller journalists to get close, and even harder to get good audio.
Dent said that in those first few minutes, organization and time management were critical in getting key interviews before the window closed and surrogates moved on to scheduled television appearances.
“We had had a million opportunities that sprouted up, so many different people to talk to it was just about figuring out how we wanted to spend our time [and] how we wanted to manage that,” Dent said.
Dent said that in the end they were happy to have found time to cover a wide range of surrogate viewpoints in the spin room, talking to everyone from Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsom and Pa. Gov. Josh Shapiro, to Vivek Ramaswamy and Republican Senator Marco Rubio.
D’Amato spoke with Gold Star Father Keyser Khan, whose son was killed during the Iraq War and who was in the spin room to campaign with Harris, as well as Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) on his support of Trump.
Dent spoke to Ramaswamy about his future, with the entrepreneur responding that he is in discussions with the Trump campaign about a potential cabinet position and that he has also been recruited heavily to run for the governorship of Ohio.
Dent said that there were some unique challenges that audio journalism presents for stories like these.
“I think the key thing about radio and audio journalism is that you have to tell a story without the eyes,” Dent said. “Natural sound becomes so much more important … serving the same role that B-roll would serve if this was a television package, so coming in making sure we’re getting that … [and] that we’re really bringing our audience with us through the ears instead of the eyes is its own challenge.”
For D’Amato, the day was a success.
“I don’t think we really had any major mess-ups the entire day,” she said “We figured everything out as it came to us and we got some really good content that I think we’re all super proud of.”
“It’s quite the fun challenge,” Dent said.
You can listen to their audio package on the debate here.
