Journalism students hone reporting skills at Freakfest

For one group of University of Wisconsin–Madison students, attending the city’s sometimes-raucous Halloween celebration will be a classroom experience instead of a barroom crawl.

About 10 news reporting students in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication will get hands-on reporting and editing experience as they provide team coverage of this weekend’s Freakfest and post their stories, pictures and video to a Web site they’ve created.

Students in two sections of Intermediate Reporting, taught by Steven Walters and Patricia Hastings, have mapped their coverage of the annual celebration, which has sometimes devolved into street violence and vandalism.

Hastings and Walters hope the project will provide their students with the experience of planning coverage and reporting on an unfolding live event.

"There’s really no substitute for hands-on reporting experience of live events. Part of it is the dynamic of learning how to change gears on the fly, if events call for it," Walters says.

In addition to her Intermediate Reporting students, Hastings will have students in her Video Broadcast class producing segments on Friday, Saturday and Sunday for the Web site.  The students’ pre-Halloween coverage is already posted to the site, which will be update frequently during the weekend.

The team’s coverage will be coordinated by Quinn Craugh, a senior from Belmont.

"Halloween on State Street is an event that affects everyone on our campus and in the community," Craugh says. "The event has undergone some major changes over the past half decade and I think the reason for the web site is that it is always interesting to see how thousands of people react to one another in area historically susceptible to volatile situations."