Seventeen student journalists from Shanghai International Studies University will be covering Election Day live in the US online.

From a base in State College, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday, the young Chinese will stream news of results from the presidential race between incumbent Barack Obama and challenger Mitt Romney as well as information about congressional contests across the country. Their webcast will also feature reports in real time from the campus of Penn State University as well as polling places and local Democratic and Republican party campaign offices. Penn State journalism students will contribute to the project of their Shanghai counterparts with post-election reports.

The coverage will be streamed via Sina Weibo, often described as "China's Twitter", and presented as a live blog on Phoenix Blog and Renren.com.

"Many Chinese media organizations have only a handful of correspondents (in the US), but we have 17. We are confident of being able to present the magnitude of this historic event," said Zhu Ye, deputy dean of the Shanghai university's journalism school and one of three faculty members leading the students.

The US election-reporting project is part of a course at the university. It's predicated on real reporting of important events such as the Shanghai World Expo. To qualify for their Election Day assignment, the 17 juniors and seniors, as well as 13 classmates reporting from home, had to pass rigorous tests in English and news-reporting techniques. Since May, they have been brainstorming story ideas and attending lectures on American politics, culture and society.

Since arriving on Oct 27, they have traveled to Washington, Philadelphia and New York, presenting the run up to the election with photos, video, print articles and social-media blurbs in Chinese and English.

During their stay in Washington, and neighboring Virginia, they interviewed American students, protesters outside the White House and white-collar workers, asking whom they planned to vote for.

"As student journalists, we are not focused on macro things like trade or foreign policy. Instead, we try to present what we see and prefer stories about ordinary people," said Ren Pinting, a senior who is the group's student leader. She cited "dramatic stories" such as a married couple who support different candidates as an example of what the students are seeking.

Ren said she was surprised at Americans' openness in sharing their political opinions, including displays of candidate and party signs on front lawns and in windows. One street in the Washington suburb of Alexandria, she said, illustrated Virginia's status as a "swing" state in the 2012 election: All the lawn signs on one side of a street were for Republicans, while pro-Democrat signs adorned the other side.

Reporting on the final stages of the campaign is a privilege for the students, most of whom hadn't visited the US before.

Shen Xinyi, a 21-year-old senior, said her most unforgettable moment was visiting a makeshift Democratic campaign office in State College with the help of two volunteers the Shanghai students met at Penn State. An experienced camera operator, Shen was too thrilled to test her microphone before her first interview.

"It's completely different from what we're doing at school," she said. "It's time for the real test!"

There have been hurdles, as even veteran campaign reporters can attest. In Alexandria, the student group was denied access to Obama's local campaign office for lacking credentials. Their attempt to cover a Romney event in Virginia was thwarted by the inability to rent a car.

At the time Washington's subway system was shut down last weekend due to Hurricane Sandy, the group was scheduled to visit the National Press Club. With storm winds howling outside their window, the students had to remain in their Alexandria motel.

"You can't face a bigger challenge than trying to cover the US elections and deal with a hurricane simultaneously," said Mark Schoeff, vice president of the Press Club's publications committee, who talked to the students at their motel once the subway reopened the following day.

That same day, the students met James Grimaldi, who won a Pulitzer Prize at the Washington Post in 2008, in the Washington bureau of the Wall Street Journal. They also interviewed Julia Chang Bloch, a native of China who immigrated to the US as a child and became the first Asian-American ambassador, serving in Nepal in the early 1990s.

To arrange these opportunities, Zhou Zongmin, the student "vice-captain" tasked with planning his cohort's trip, hadn't slept for 30 hours. Zhou tapped the network he began establishing as an intern last spring at a Washington television station. The job put him in contact with journalists from the National Journal, Politico and the Wall Street Journal, and he attended the taping of NBC's "Meet the Press" and the MSNBC politics program "Hardball With Chris Matthews".

"They understand our anxiety, and also show great interest in meeting with us," Zhou said of his Washington contacts.

The networking seems to have paid off. Within five days of landing in the US, the students had cranked out 45 stories across media platforms, some gaining as many as 5,000 hits on China's Phoenix Blog with one reported published in a local Chinese newspaper.

"The influence of their coverage will largely decide their final grade," said faculty member Zhu, who also led a team of six students from Shanghai International Studies University in covering the 2008 US presidential campaign, along with anchor Cao Jingxing of Hong Kong-based Phoenix Television. The current trip is drawing more attention, Zhu said.

Ford Risley, head of Penn State's journalism department, who met the Shanghai students both times, believes this year's election will be exciting but less momentous than the 2008 election of America's first black president.

"This election is certainly very important because of the problems especially the economic problems that the United States is faced with. It is a very close election. We still don't know who the winner is going be," said Risley, whose department will send 17 Penn State journalism students to report in China next year.

A survey by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that Chinese are more interested in the US election this year than they were in 2008, with 36 percent of respondents in China saying they would pay close attention compared to 19 percent four years ago.

With 2,500 followers so far on Sina Weibo and even more on Facebook-like Renren.com, the student journalists are getting immediate feedback. Their first video package, recorded in and around Washington's Capitol Hill, was criticized by some as unbalanced because all the interviewees expressed support for Obama. One poster questioned the point of doing such a story given that a huge majority of registered voters in the District of Columbia are Democrats.

Those and other comments were discussed among the reporting team at its nightly editorial meeting. Zhao Tao, another of the group's three professors, who has been teaching news writing at SISU for 18 years, said it was necessary to present the views of individual voters but that in-depth reporting would also be expected in the coming weeks.

Shen, the senior, was asked to predict the outcome of the presidential race.

"As journalist, we shouldn't take sides," she said. "But according to my observation, Obama will win, as he has reportedly dominated in Ohio and Virginia, two major swing states. The vote will be very close, though."

For China Daily

(China Daily 11/06/2012 page1)