I-ELECT is a multimedia political reporting project in conjunction with the University of Illinois College of Communications. The project was undertaken by students in a journalism class and has been overseen by Department of Journalism faculty. The group of students organized in a newsroom to produce print, online and broadcast products. The group also conducted a scientific survey to drive its reporting. The idea behind the project was students covering students. The Daily Illini, WPGU-FM 107.1, WILL-AM 580 and others have assisted with the project.

From day one, we’ve struggled, but we’ve succeeded. We’ve struggled with how to pull this project together, how to present it and how to make it have an impact, but we did it.

We organized ourselves from the start around one goal: Doing something that no one else was doing. We wanted to cover youth and politics.

But we didn’t just want to rehash old news, old issues. We wanted to dig deeper and explain the issues.

And we wanted to do it from our perspective. Not our parents’. Not our politicians’. Ours.

We’re young adults. We’re college students. We’re the group everyone talks about when they talk about the “youth voter problem.”

So who better to take a real look at it. No, we didn’t write in slang. No, we didn’t dumb it down or cutesify it so that college students would be interested. We didn’t talk down. We did a professional project that we can be very proud of.

The perspective is much more subtle. It’s in how we understand the issues. It’s in how we pursue the issues. It’s in what we view as important.

And to top it off, we got scientific. We surveyed our peers. We didn’t just stop a few and pretend that they stand for the rest.

We were serious about this. We understand that our generation has a serious issue with voting. But rather than lament it, we thought it would be a better idea to go investigate it, think about it, talk to experts about it, talk to the people it affected and maybe start putting the pieces together for ourselves.

After all, it’s our generation that’s told we have a problem. As journalists, we felt we ought to take a good, hard look at why.



Adam Jadhav and Emily West
I-ELECT executive producers/editors
Seniors in journalism

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