Political Advertising and Data Journalism: MN’s 2018 Charnley Project Course

• In Event: Active Learning Inside & Outside the Classroom

Abstract

Increasingly students require practical experience as part of the educational process. Additionally, employers argue that for success, graduating students require intense, real world experience using traditional research, writing and editing skills. A part-time internship, while remaining valuable element of many programs, is not always able to provide students opportunities that translate into demonstrable skills or working time in an intense, real world environment. In response to these changes, some programs are replacing a summarization capstone with a more applied learning course that can simulate or provide real world experiences inside of the classroom that will allow students to produce work products to serve as examples for a starting portfolio.

The 2018 Charnley Project Course was designed to develop professional skills for students in Journalism, Strategic Communications, or Political Science. The course was a collaborative effort, led by two faculty, backed by collegiate research support, and conducted in a resource sharing partnership with Minnpost, a news organization based in the Twin Cities, allowing for articles that were written and produced by students as part of the course requirements to be published professionally. Election coverage has long been an important part of the news culture in America, but in recent years, news and advertising have converged in their importance as part of the election cycle. With pre-election recognition that Minnesota, as an important battleground state in 2018, would be sure to draw significant political advertising by both candidates and outside groups, this project took the form of an upper-level data journalism lab executed in real time focusing on the advertising related to the 10 Federal contests (two US Senate and eight US House) and in all five statewide elections in Minnesota.

With the objective to develop an intense, real world environment for practical learning, this course was designed to provide students an opportunity to collect, analyze and use data in an election year advertising environment as it occurred in real time. The course ran on a weekly schedule for data collection starting the first full week of the semester. Students in the course used data they collected from the FCC’s online public file database to track spending, week by week, across all radio stations, television stations and cable providers in the state of Minnesota. They then worked with this data, reported on the findings, and drafted blog entries and articles that were published on the project website and by the Minnpost.

Author

• Michael Beckstrand, University of Minnesota