Politics touches every one of our beats in one way or another, especially in the lead-up to the election. And even if it’s not our normal beat, it’s likely that many of us will be pulled onto election coverage whether we like it or not. We’ll explore how to cover this and other elections, whether it’s your beat or not, talk about the easiest way to get data, the best ways to navigate political language and the simplest way to build sources to help you get a story that goes beyond the political horse race of who is ahead in the polls.
Moderator: Kristina Torres
Panelists: Sabrina Eaton, Jeremy Peters, Eugene Scott
SABRINA EATON is currently the one-woman Washington, D.C., bureau for the largest media outlet in a key political state: Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer of Cleveland. She covers everything in Washington that affects Ohio, from Congress to the Supreme Court to the Trump administration. She shoots photos and videos in addition to writing. National media outlets regularly pick up her scoops. She’s won journalism awards from the National Press Foundation, Society of American Business Editors and Writers, Associated Press Society of Ohio and Cleveland Press Club. Her television appearances include “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” “Hardball with Chris Matthews,” “The TODAY Show” and other CNN, Fox, C-SPAN and MSNBC news programs.
JEREMY W. PETERS is a reporter in the Washington bureau of The New York Times who covers politics. He has reported on a variety of topics for the paper, including two presidential campaigns, the machinations on Capitol Hill and the intersection of politics and the news media. Most recently he covered the 2016 election. His other assignments in his decade at The Times have included the financial markets, the economy and New York politics. He usually takes a notebook with him on vacation to file dispatches for the Travel section, which has featured his writing on trips from Corsica to the Caribbean. He graduated from the University of Michigan, where he was a reporter and editor for The Michigan Daily, with a bachelor’s degree in history and political science.
EUGENE SCOTT is a national political reporter for the Washington Post. He covers identity politics for the Fix, a political analysis vertical. He previously covered the 2016 presidential election for CNN and was a fellow at the Georgetown University Institute of Politics. Scott has won multiple awards and fellowships throughout his 20 year career and his work regularly appears on MSNBC and NPR among other outlets. He received his master’s degree from the Harvard Kennedy School and sits on the board of advisors for the journalism school at the University of North Carolina, his alma mater.
KRISTINA TORRES is the leadership communications manager for the University System of Georgia, a position she began after a 24-year career working at newspapers and media companies in South Carolina, Minnesota and Georgia. Called one of “the best state capitol reporters in America” by The Washington Post, Kristina during her career spent more than a decade as an education beat writer for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where she worked on the Pulitzer Prize-nominated team that exposed the nation’s biggest test cheating scandal. She is also a member of the NLGJA national board of directors. A Colorado native, Kristina graduated with a journalism degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She’s on Twitter at @The_KristinaT.