Coming off of its success from last year’s presidential election, AUTV-20 at Ashland University returned to air with another election show on Tuesday to give students practice in television programming and inform viewers on the local race. 

Originally designed as a five-hour program hosted every four years for the presidential election, the show altered its purpose for this year and became a two-hour program focused on Ashland County elections and races for seats such as the city school board president and city council. 

The student coordinator of the show is Carrie Smith, a senior in the department and the station manager at AUTV-20. This year she is managing and producing for the show and leading all the students involved. 

“This is my first time ever really doing executive producing or producing in general,” Smith said. “So, I think it’s really rewarding just to be able to have this experience.”

The structure of the show that Smith designed is a live show that includes on screen election results and cuts to the Journalism and Digital Media (JDM) department newsroom with The Collegian and AU-Live. There will also be interviews, talks with local leaders and packages about various aspects of local voting. 

Not only does an election show provide access to election information, but it also allows the students of JDM an opportunity to learn more about their field and about using all four of their media outlets together on one project. 

“This is where we get all four media on the same page and do something together,” Dave McCoy, chair of the journalism and digital media department said. “It is single subject, purposeful, its beautiful [and] I wish we could do it more.”

This year’s programming included sit down interviews with local representatives such as Mayor Matt Miller of Ashland and Mayor Randy Spade of Jeromesville. It also featured commentary from lead anchors, Evan Laux and Lydia Bice, seniors in the Journalism and Digital Media department. 

Bice looks forward to what the show will do, not just in its impact on the community, but also for her future career. 

“This is a fantastic opportunity for me because I need as much live broadcasting experience as possible since I will hopefully be reporting local news on live television every day after graduation,” she said. “This anchoring practice is incredibly beneficial to me and I’m thankful that JDM provides me with these experiences.”

Laux is looking forward to this year’s show as this is his first live show experience in the JDM department and is ready to see the community impact the show has.  

“Usually in smaller towns and communities, it’s a lot harder to get insight into what’s going on I would say than in a larger city because there’s a smaller media presence,” Laux said. “But a lot of times [the issues] do affect them personally so it’s good that they know that. 

During the show, the crew also went live to the department newsroom to see what was happening that night online at ashland-collegian.com, the fully converged, student run news site of JDM. Managed by Katie Foster, she and her staff kept the site up to date and wrote articles for the entire show runtime. 

“This election [show] year is shorter than a big presidential election year, but important nonetheless,” Foster said. “This is my first year doing this…I think it will be good for extemporaneous thinking and writing.”

Foster and her crew covered a variety of topics over the course of the program such as student’s opinions on why voting local matters, the role of WRDL in the election show and how political clubs on campus respond to the importance of local voting. 

Hosting this show not only keeps the public up to date about their local elections, but also helps students see what operations on a long form television program look like. Students in charge of the show’s production worked under John Skrada, director of broadcasting and operations at AU. 

Skrada was tasked with connecting all four media in the department together so that they could work cohesively throughout the show. He ran camera lines to the newsroom from the television studio, provided audio to the radio station and set up the production room for the student television producers so that they could run the show. 

Having worked on over 1,000 live shows before, Skrada is excited to bring this program to air as a learning experience for the students. 

“I really like doing this because this is actually the only thing we really do live,” he said. “Once you go into it, you have to either sink or swim…there’s some mistakes you’ve got to make so it’s a really good learning tool, especially for the ones who are thinking of going into live TV. 

While the show was taking place in the TV studio, those who could not watch live we able to listen in to the show on 88.9 WRDL FM radio which was simulcasting the program from the campus radio station. 

“We believe that a collaboration about this makes it easier for the student learning perspective,” 88.9 WRDL Radio Station Manager Derek Wood said. “The content collaboration is key to reaching a community that needs this information and one thing that WRDL has always prided itself on is doing things that are unique and different from other stations. 

Though the show was live on Tuesday, it can still be seen online on the AUTV-20 YouTube channel and photos from the night can be seen on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram @autv20.