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During the most recent election in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, Steve Novak and the reporters he works with at the local news site lehighvalleylive.com had a problem to deal with: a Republican candidate for county executive who would “spout off actual nonsense,” Novak said. They initially refrained from covering those statements due to the candidate’s lack of basis for them.

But when the candidate spoke at a rally and called for forceful removal of any school board members who supported mask mandates, Novak and his coworkers knew the story needed to be covered.

“We kind of figured, ‘OK, we’re just kind of going to let that go for a little while because he’s just saying things,’” Novak said. “Then it turned to that. It sounds like he’s advocating for something physical, real, potentially violent. It’s like, we have to address this now. I don’t know if we did the right thing, ignoring his statements before that, trying not to give them oxygen.”

Novak spoke at the Newhouse School of Public Communications on Tuesday evening alongside the other two winners of the school’s Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting. The award, established in 2009 to celebrate the life and work of alumna Robin Toner, is split by local and national reporting. The prize for local reporting was given to Novak and fellow lehighvalleylive.com reporter Sara Satullo, and the national prize went to David Graham of The Atlantic.

Mark Lodato, dean of the Newhouse School, gave an opening introduction prior to the start of the talk. Two Newhouse students, graduate student Adriana Rozas Rivera and senior Ghael Fobes, moderated the discussion.

Novak and Satullo’s work centered on Northampton County, which is both a swing county and a bellwether county — in the last 100 years, in all but three elections, the candidate that won Northampton County also won the presidency. The county was home to a strong partisan divide during the 2020 election cycle, and Novak and Satullo’s reporting focused on the role of local voters and what the county had to say about national affairs.

“We knew it was going to be a kind of a nail biter, and we felt pretty confident that whoever won Northampton County would win the White House,” Satullo said.

Graham’s award-winning national reporting also revolved around the presidential elections in 2020 but heavily covered voting methods and election integrity. One of the initial struggles Graham faced in his reporting, though, was in creating new strategies for finding sources. Since candidates were not traveling or holding rallies as frequently due to the pandemic, politically-interested individuals who might want to comment were not as directly available as when they could be found at rallies.

Novak and Satullo faced similar issues in Northampton County and even went door to door leaving business cards and notes in residents’ mailboxes trying to find people to interview.

Another way they found sources, though, was with the help of Newhouse students. Joel Kaplan, associate dean at Newhouse and a professor of magazine, news and digital journalism, had students in his political reporting course contact and vet about 200 names of voters who had previously stated they might be interested in talking to reporters.

Along with discussing their work, the panelists commented on recent trends in politics and journalism such as how to cover false statements by politicians. Graham said that since The Atlantic is “kind of a voice-y publication,” he had the ability to try and debunk false statements in his writing, something he said he started to see more from other publications since the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

“To this day, we have politicians who are consistently trying to tell us that what happened, before cameras and in plain daylight, did not happen in the way that we saw it,” Fobes said while moderating.

Towards the end of the discussion, Fobes and Rozas Rivera opened the floor up to questions from audience members. Several students, along with Jess Novak — an SU alumna from the Goldring Arts Journalism and Communications program and Toner winner Steve Novak’s sister — took advantage of the opportunity to ask the panelists questions.

The audience’s questions included the relationship between national and local reporting and how to ensure personal bias does not impact a story. Throughout the event and the questions, the panelists discussed the importance of extensive sourcing in order to properly cover a story.

“Oftentimes, where the election is fought is amongst the voters who don’t go to rallies. It’s like the people who least want to talk about politics are the people who are deciding politics,” Fobes said.

As part of their coverage, Novak and Satullo profiled several residents of Northampton County to localize some of the larger topics in the election. Novak said that talking to individual people and putting a face to larger stories offered a different perspective on the election.

“Most people, at least when they’re talking to you one-on-one as a person, they don’t have all the other baggage — at least not obviously,” Novak said. “It’s easier to see them more as a person.”

DISCLAIMER: Ghael Fobes is a former podcast editor for The Daily Orange. He does not currently influence the editorial content of The D.O.

Published on December 1, 2021 at 12:49 am

Contact Abby: avpresso@syr.edu | @abbyvp08