Meister means master: Our humble goal is to be the mock election's News-meister

By Mark Butzow

Welcome to the News-meister “blog,” one facet of Western journalism students' coverage of the university’s ambitious Mock Presidential Election, “The Road to the White House Starts at Western Illinois University.” As this project progresses between now and Nov. 5, you'll find individual stories, shorter tidbits and updates from the MPE organizers on this site, along with the occasional first-person or insider’s account.

If you're unfamiliar, this is a weblog (“blog” for short), which means every new entry pushes earlier entries down the page. Older stories are still accessible, but you have to scroll down to find them and eventually they get outdated (talking in future tense about things that have since happened, etc.).

We'll try to post items from each night of the mock election in a “most-important-first” order, and we’ll try to make it clear as you scroll down when you’ve reached the “dividing line” between coverage of the distinct MPE events and evenings.

For these first couple of days, we've assembled some explanatory and feature-oriented material to whet your appetite. You'll learn:
• whether to expect higher student involvement in real upcoming elections.
• how this event, the nation’s largest mock election, came to fruition, and
• what it’s like for students to form a campaign team from the ground up.

The first "deadline coverage" will show up Tuesday evening (with more possibly added on Wednesday). We hope you find it both interesting and informative.

-- Professors Bill Knight, Lisa Barr, Mark Butzow and Lisa Kernek will coordinate the News-Meister coverage and coach about 50 eager student reporters, photographers and copy editors.