Live Blogging: Covering the Election in Innovative Ways

6:31 ONA Mizzou's March 15 meeting wraps up! That's all, folks. April's meetings will consist of officer elections. Interested in becoming an ONA Mizzou executive board member? Email ONAMizzou@gmail.com for more information!

6:29: Social media strategies: Summers uses Twitter as a reporter's notebook to help log quotes from events quickly, versus sifting through paper notes. But Facebook? Summers uses it as a minimal work and mostly personal social media network.

6:27: What's it like to work at Politico? Summers says it is intense and can be demanding, but she has a wide range to cover a variety of political topics; often, stories she wouldn't be able to write at other news organizations. But don't be afraid - Summers says there's room for younger journalists, too. She says the newsroom is young and looks for journalists who are obsessed with politics and have strong writing and story telling skills.

6:25: Deadlines on the campaign trail can be tight. She mentions a time she wrote a story in under 20 minutes (on her Blackberry) while fellow Politico reporters drove and made calls.

6:22: Juana Summers is on ONA's board of directors. She says to definitely get involved, attend conferences. "It's totally worth it." Have ideas about how to help ONA or make it stronger? Summers says to contact her!

6:20: "It really helps to like the people that you work with." Summers discusses that when being embedded with other journalists, it's important to build relationships with them, even when working for competing papers. "If you don't make friends, you're not a nice person."

6:19: Hermain Cain, John Huntsman and now Rick Santorum. Almost Rick Perry (but his campaign dropped, too). As candidates drop, Politico moves Summers around. "It's a little bit of a luck of the draw." Senior correspondents are more likely to be assigned candidates who are most likely to receive their party's nomination.

6:18: Summers says her convergence journalism background (she's a 2009 Mizzou grad!) has helped her juggle all the things she's asked to do for her job.

6:16: And there's no set work platform, either. Summers could be shooting video, blogging and working on radio pieces all in one day.

6:13: And she's here, Skyping in from Puerto Rico! Juana Summers is embedded in the Rick Santorum campaign, following the candidate from town to state ... and territory! There's no "normal" day on the campaign as far as schedule - she says she doesn't keep track of her schedule and can find out about events the same day they're going to happen.

6:10: ONA Mizzou is working to bring in Politico reporter Juana Summers. Hang on, we're experience technical difficulties!

6:05: How crazy is the ProPublica newsroom during election season. Shaw says it's not too intense since ProPublica focuses on accountability in their products versus being "race horses."

5:54: How long does it take to build an app like this? Shaw says he knew other news organizations were soon to come out with a similar app and went into "crunch time" to get an app in the works and on the web.

5:53: It's not always easy to understand where campaign money is going and how it's being spent. Shaw brings up the point about finding out where candidates run political ads - reporters would have to physically go to individual television stations to request that information.

5:47: "There's a lot of money spent in Ohio, a lot of money spent in Florida." - Shaw on campaign contributions.

5:45: We're getting a walk through of how Super PACs' have to report contributions. Shaw says you can find some interesting things when looking at the raw data.

5:42: Shaw walks the audience through ProPublica's campaign contribution project. Check it out: http://projects.propublica.org/pactrack/contributions/tree

5:38: Shaw: "We had all this data in our database and we basically wanted to make it so readers could use it in a way that the FCC hadn't provided."

5:36: Shaw's discussing how API's help you build applications by pulling data from websites. Imagine being able to automatically download the information from a site without having to even visit the site.

5:33: ProPublica Applications Developer Al Shaw has taken the floor (or rather, screen!) At ProPublica, he's currently working on tracking campaign donations.

5:30: Hot topic debate about Ave's last prompt! The question arrises: what's the story - and what would the headline be?

5:25: Much of Ave's situations, while ethical, make you debate between having a scoop of a story, or is something newsworthy.

5:18: Second scenario from Ave - Would you print a scandalous photo of a state official and a woman. What would you do in this situation - make a story about it, and how would you go about it?

5:09: Christopher Ave asks, is it ethical (and newsworthy) to play a video of a politician joking around using donor or tax funds for personal expenses. Would you run the video? The audience is chiming in.

5:06: Ave is discussing ethical issues in political reporting. The audience is in the seat of journalists, and Ave will be quizzing us down in a "what would you do?" manner.

5:04: Christopher Ave, St. Louis Post-Dispatch political editor is up first! He'll be discussing how new technology affects modern political journalists.

5:02 Welcome to ONA Mizzou's March 15 meeting, Covering the Election in Innovative Ways. We'll be speaking with three political journalists* today who are covering the 2012 elections in different ways! Today's live blog will be ran by ONA Mizzou secretary Nicole Garner! Let's get started!

*Politico's Juana Summers may be unable to make todays event due to work on the political trail!

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