Charles Apple

Ball State student journalist Kyle Ellis wrote to clue us in about how the Ball State Daily News covered Election Night.

The big feature: the Daily News turned its page one sideways, just like the Hartford Courant did.

I’m pretty sure that’s a file photo, rather than a live shot from Tuesday. This, too, has been debated among daily newspapers the past couple of days, in the wake of covers by the Chicago Sun-Times, The Orlando Sentinel’s first edition and the Virginian-Pilot.

Kyle writes:

This front was designed by Jennifer Minutillo and Shelby Murphy. Jen did the typography and layout and Shelby did the photo editing. The process was intense throughout the night and once those two had a few ideas ironed out we put out a beautiful front page. We’ve gotten a lot of compliments from our design alumni and the reaction on campus was really positive, too.

Going horizontal was a very drastic change for us, but it really suited the occasion.

As you can imagine it was a pretty intense night for a college newsroom, but Jennifer, Shelby and the rest of the design team handled it with class and poise. I think the entire staff, both design and editorial, did a great job of advance planning - we had a strong graphics presence with Christa Music coming through huge!

I think our inside presence was as strong as the front!

A few of those inside pages:

Kyle continues:

Also, we had a tabloid stuffed inside - a publication called Chirp - that comes out the morning of every home football game. The design of Chirp was done by Ali Newton, our design editor….she certainly had her hands full managing both election coverage and the tab, but did a great job!

Heh. Yes, Ball State played a football game Wednesday. In fact, it beat Northern Illinois 45-14, exciting fans’ bowl hopes. Representatives from the Orange Bowl were in attendance, the Daily News reports.

But back to election coverage…

More than anything, I think the biggest testament to our election coverage and the design that we accomplished on Tuesday night was attributed to the fact that everyone understood the magnitude of the event we were covering. Along with Jennifer, Shelby, Christa and Ali — Stephanie Cope, Becky Rother, Logan Braman and I were also in there. Great camaraderie is just as important as ability - I think the Ball State Daily News is really fortunate to have both.

This was truly a team effort and I couldn’t be more proud of the work we did!

For a larger view of that front page, click the thumbnail:

Thanks for filling us in, Kyle!

This entry was posted on Friday, November 7th, 2008 at 10:30 am and is filed under College journalism, Elections, News design, VizEds Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.