The Democratic and Republican national conventions are usually marked by the biggest names in news media covering the biggest names in politics.
However, the gravitation of both reporting and campaigning towards new forms like blogs and Internet fundraising has placed convention demographics in transition. At this year's conventions, a new demographic - students - were making inroads into the biggest parties in party politics.
College students from across the country made their presences felt at both conventions this year. Some came to take sound bites and snap photos for their college radio stations and newspapers. Others, mostly leaders of campus campaigns, converged upon Denver and St. Paul as party delegates, voting for the Democratic or Republican nominees from the convention floors.
"It was an amazing experience to be part of history," said Bryon Eagon, a University of Wisconsin-Madison student who attended the Democratic convention as a delegate. "It was really neat to be part of a handful of young delegates who were able to show everyone there and everyone around the country that students are becoming active."
Eagon was elected by the state Democratic party to represent the 2nd congressional district of Wisconsin after he helped coordinate Barack Obama's campaign as the state coordinator of the group Wisconsin Students for Barack Obama. He said that it was important to him to represent student interests at the Democratic convention, and that he expects his convention experience to help him in further addressing student issues that transcend party politics.
"I'm really looking forward to turning all that energy surrounding the primary and surrounding the campaign into activism and engagement on campuses," Eagon said.
Of course, present at both conventions were large contingents of activists. Present also was a handful of college reporters hoping to capture the developments both on the floors of the conventions and on the streets outside.
Ed Matthews and Britney McIntosh, two student photographers from the University of Kentucky, attended the Republican National Convention on unofficial business, hoping to freelance their photographs for newspapers for which they had worked that summer. When the two got wrapped up in a breakaway demonstration in St. Paul, they were arrested and held in jail for 36 hours on probable cause for felony rioting.
Both students had registered for media credentials and claimed that they were clearly marked as members of the news media when they were arrested. Matthews, who earlier in the day had been sprayed in the face with pepper spray while trailing the same group of protesters, expressed frustration about how poorly his reporting experience ended up.
"It's just really unfortunate that we were held (in jail) that long even though we identified ourselves as journalists and weren't there to participate in the protests," Matthews said.
McIntosh described the experience as "character building." Above all, though, she said she hopes that her American Civil Liberties Union lawyer will be able to retrieve her confiscated photographs.
Another student reporter covering the convention from the floor described a much different experience. George Mesthos '09, who reported at the Republican National Convention for WBRU, was encouraged by the access he had to delegates and other representatives at the convention.
"They expect a mic in their face," Mesthos said. "Most of the time they didn't even realize we were a college radio station."
After overcoming the nightmarish process of obtaining media credentials for the convention, it proved to be an exciting place to mingle with other national news media as much as to collect stories about the campaign, Mesthos said.
Though Mesthos described his own reporting as run-of-the-mill radio coverage, he said he met other students engaged in "new-media types of reporting," frequently posting their experiences and observations on blogs and uploading videos to YouTube.
