Campaign Trails and Tweets
“You’re behind if you’re not tweeting things,” says Jessica Taylor, a political journalist with over 11,000 followers and nearly 20,000 tweets. She tweets at least several times a day, usually on topics relating to politics, but not always (one of her most-favorited tweets references Saturday Night Live’s 40th Anniversary Special). Currently the campaign editor for the Hill’s campaign blog, Ballot Box, Taylor oversaw the Hill’s coverage of the 2014 midterm elections, and will oversee coverage for the 2016 Presidential election.
Jessica Taylor is one of the lucky few that has been able to pursue a career in a lifelong interest. She’s been a political journalist for 10 years, and can trace her involvement in both journalism and politics back to elementary school.
In second grade, she loved the news, and created a school newspaper, the Pirate Press, for a class project. Published on a green sheet of computer paper, the “most salacious feature was who liked whom on the playground. Not exactly groundbreaking journalism,” Taylor laughs.
Second grade was also the beginning of her interest in presidential politics. Growing up in Elizabethton, Tennessee, Taylor remembers neighbors from Arkansas who had known the Clintons. “I thought that was the coolest thing, so I started following that.”
Her interest in writing and news continued throughout her childhood. “My parents had to pull me away from the news,” Taylor says. An 8th grade teacher encouraged her writing, something that stuck with Taylor. She followed the news on her own time, but “it probably wasn’t until college that [she] took political science courses.”
Taylor went to Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, graduating magna cum laude. During her time at Furman, she was editor in chief of the university’s paper, the Paladin, and was given the chance to cover the 2004 South Carolina Democratic primary during her freshman year.
After graduation, she worked as a staff writer for the National Journal, writing daily stories on the 2008 GOP candidates while focusing on polling and advertising. From there, she moved up to research director of The Almanac of American Politics at the National Journal, and became an assistant editor at Politico for the 2010 midterms. Since then, she’s worked as an analyst for CBS News and a senior analyst and reporter for the Rothenberg Political Report. She moved to the Hill in January 2014, and has been campaign editor there ever since.
Editing involves more responsibility than reporting. As an editor, Taylor is responsible for other reporters’ work as well as her own. Taylor says it’s “very rewarding in helping make stories the best they can be and making reporters better reporters and writers.” She tries to be tough, but fair on her writers, because if there’s ever an error in her reporters’ work, she’s “often the one who gets the call.”
For political journalism, she looks for reporters who are “aggressive but professional.” Because campaigns decide who’s going to be in charge of the country, she says, the press has “a responsibility to cover them fairly and aggressively.” She describes a good political reporter as someone who “loves campaigns and politics and wants to get the truth out there.”
One of the things Taylor enjoys about covering elections is the unpredictability of them. “Anyone that can say how this is going to pan out, I think is lying,” she says. By following political campaigns, she’s learned how campaigns are run, and how one candidate might run smarter than another. She cited President Obama as an example, with his methods in 2008 and 2012. “Obama really pioneered the way that you target voters. I just think that’s something fascinating, micro-targeting people, to know how many times you voted, whether you’re a high propensity voter,” Taylor says.
An interesting factor in covering the upcoming campaign is the advent of the internet and social media. In the past, it was just the “boys on the bus” following and reporting on presidential campaigns. Taylor says, “Well, everyone can be a boy on the bus now.” She acknowledges that there are far more outlets now, and with online publications and blogs, just about anyone can put their two cents in.
That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but Taylor thinks that journalists who can earn the trust of candidates, work with them on a human level, are still very important. When working closely with a candidate, you should “show them that you’re a fair journalist and that you’re someone that can be trusted.” Taylor firmly believes that journalist/candidate relationships are important, saying that she’s “certainly an old-school journalist in that regard.”
While she may be “old-school” when it comes to certain aspects of journalism, Taylor’s Twitter presence makes her a “new-school” journalist. Social media, Twitter included, can be used to increase a journalist’s visibility and clout. She tells her journalists to take notes in order to file things, but also “if you’re not showing your social media presence, you’re not there.”
She remembers that in 2008, Twitter wasn’t the tool that it is now, and how it became more important in 2010 and 2012. Now, in 2015, candidates are active on Twitter and even using Snapchat, and are able to “go around the media.” Taylor says “the days are gone that if you wanted to get a story out, you went to the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal,” but by maintaining relationships with candidates, political journalists remain important to the process.
Political journalism has its own special bumps in the road. Many times, publicists or campaign managers will tell the press what they want people to know. They may want to spin an event a certain way. There’s a line you have to walk, between maintaining relationships with these people and risking becoming their tools. “We’re not supposed to be PR vehicles,” Taylor says.
She describes the relationships between journalists and politicians as a symbiotic one. You publish the processed stories, because they’re news. It’s the journalist’s job to look at other angles and find new ways of telling these stories. But once you write these stories, you earn the trust of candidates and as Taylor says, “that’s going to make your reporting better.”
One way to make political writing stand out is to think outside of the box. Taylor recommends interviewing people around the candidate, “finding those people who had those relationships with the candidates going back decades.” It gets to who the candidate is as a person, and will be a slightly different story than what others might publish when they remain focused on current events.
Despite the changes in social media and technology in the last few years, the core of political journalism has remained the same. Merging old-school philosophies with new-school techniques is what will make the upcoming Presidential election so interesting, and why political journalism is such a compelling, ever-changing field. The one thing that should always be remembered, in Taylor’s words, is that “trust should be the epitome of journalism.”
