During the past campaign, college journalists from swing states blogged about what was happening in their states for the Washington Post. The 12, as the series was called, featured Marquette’s very own Tessa Fox. She visited my elections class Tuesday to talk about the experience.

Most of the work involved short posts, like this tiny post on Gov. Scott Walker’s efforts to comply with the Affordable Care Act. But she also did some multimedia, like her audio slideshow of an interview of one Wisconsin voter.

Overall, Fox said she averaged two hours a week on the project, which she said was “time-consuming but manageable” alongside her job at the Marquette Tribune and her classes. What made it nice was that if she couldn’t observe some event, she could lean on someone else’s coverage by linking to them.

What made Fox’s presentation interesting was that she is a fellow student. Like Brynne Ramella tweeted, “It was nice to have a student visitor for once!”

More to read

—Melanie Lawder covers Fox’s visit at her blog.

—Tessa Fox’s blog about the experience. (What do you call a blog about a blog? A metablog? A web log log?)

Election Day finally came Tuesday after a semester of talking about it with friends, reading about it online and discussing it in my classes, particularly my class on journalism and elections, JOUR 4932.

So after casting a ballot at my own polling place in the Alumni Memorial Union, I trekked over to Centennial Hall on 733 N. Eighth St.

Talking to people went fairly well. I didn’t seem to have the rejection rate Brynne Ramella and Alex Rydin had at the AMU. I managed to get a majority to talk to me. My personal theory is that people who have been waiting in line have lost the patience necessary to chat with a reporter, student journalist or otherwise.

I had an interesting range of responses. First was a woman, Anna Sweet, who said she voted straight Democrat and probably would voted Green if they were a viable choice. The next person I talked to, Marquette University student Chris Hardin, said he agreed with with his chosen candidate Mitt Romney across the board. Milwaukee is perceived as being extremely Democrat. (And correctly: It went 80–20 for Obama on Tuesday.) But parts of the city are much more moderate. The two wards that vote at Centennial Hall, 187 and 188, did go to Obama 55–44 in 2008, but that’s hardly a blowout.

If I had any problems, it was that Centennial Hall was too boring. There were very few people there when I was and things just went smoothly. I talked to a few election observers who really had little to report. There were no ballot shortages, broken machines or people disturbing others as they exercised their right to vote. This is good for the democratic process, of course, but makes live-blogging that much less interesting.

More to read

—Michael LoCicero shared what he learned from live-blogging — namely, that it isn’t his cup of tea.

—The Marquette Tribune and other Marquette student media had their own live-blog. (Full disclosure: I work for the Tribune.)

—Our professor aggregated the coverage from 14 other students and me at his website.

Our class visited and tweeted about the law school’s latest poll Thursday. Of course, the poll got plenty of attention, due to how close it is to the election. There were several media outlets there, and the room was quite full.

The biggest headline was, naturally, the presidential results. The poll showed Obama leading Romney 51–43 among likely voters, which beats the margin of error. But the senate race is a statistical tie. Baldwin leads Thompson by only 4 points, 47–43.

A recent visitor to our class, blogger Craig Gilbert, warned of overanlyzing poll results. Gilbert, who works for the Journal-Sentinel and blogs at the Wisconsin Voter blog, noted that there’s still a one in 20 chance that the data is off by more than the margin of error. This is even ignoring the possible mistakes the pollster could have made.

That meant that a single poll is most valuable in the context of the most recent polls. A poll showing a bigger lead than previous polls could either be the result of statistical noise or a pollster’s mistake. It could also indicate an actual change.

So what did the flurry of polls after Marquette’s show?

We can see that Obama’s edge in the Marquette Law poll has continued. However, the average lead is smaller than what Marquette gave him. Whether this is due to a minuscule gain by Romney or statistical noise is hard to tell. Some national measures of the race — including Rasmussen’s tracking poll — show a slight increase in Obama’s lead over the past few days.

Polls agree that Obama is more popular among Wisconsin’s likely voters, whether the lead has grown remains ambiguous. Unless you have reason to think polls are systematically wrong in the president’s favor, that translates to an actual lead. As fun as it is to muse, we’ll only know in about 72 hours — when the results come in after Wisconsin’s polling places close at 8 p.m. on election night.

More to read

—The Marquette Law School blog on the event features a clear summary, but not as much depth. The Law School’s polling website has a more detailed summary.

—The details of the poll results announcement and video.

—My classmate Alex Rydin and Brynne Ramella summarized the results. Rydin focuses more on the poll results; Ramella on her experience there.

—Gilbert didn’t post about the Marquette Law School poll itself, but looked at the past 12 months of Marquette’s polling.

Before, during and after the first presidential debate, reporters from the New York Times live-blogged the events at the University of Denver starting at 4 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time.

The Times’ live blogs feel very polished. Almost too polished to actually be called a blog. They even embed charts and graphics in and sometimes, photos taken that night.

One of the nicest features for someone looking back on the debate is something I haven’t seen anywhere else: five links to “highlights” at the top of the page. It’s a very simple technique, but it helps people who want to look back on it.

The secret does not appear to be reusing material from before, like Politifact did on the night of the debate. Some research and background information might have been prepared, however. Part of the key is staffing: 15 separate reporters posted on the blog, not counting the six photographers or the seven reporters whose tweets were included.

One thing I liked was the focus on fact-checking. The blog allows you to click a tab at the top and filter out everything but posts auditing the two candidates’ claims. The Times does not use any kind of rating system for claims — like the Truth-O-Meter — but I thought the posts made the actual facts of the matter quite clear.