Recent Work

First Time Voters - Video Project

By: Will Korn

The 2012 Presidential Election and the campaign processes leading up to it, was an incredibly exciting time for me - this year's election was my first as an eligible voter of age.  Although I am 20 years old I was not able to vote in the 2008 election, and my first time voting this year gave me an empowering feeling of citizenship.

So, I decided to make first time voters, like myself, the subject of a video story that I did for my journalism class at UT Austin.  It was a relatively new challenge for me, as I had only minimal experience developing a news video story through my work with Texas Student Television.  Within the group-work setting of the project, at times it was difficult to coordinate with my group.  Despite this, I feel like our group produced a quality project, and it is something that I am highly proud of.

Our video project addresses first time voters in the 2012 Presidential Election.  We conducted interviews with four individual first time voters from Texas - two of which are close friends of mine.  We asked them questions such as "How did it feel to the vote for the first time?" and "In a red state like Texas, how influential do you think your individual vote really was?" Our video story also expands into what we believe is a national-scale problem among many voters: the Electoral College system.

We found an even split among our interviewees' opinions about the importance of their individual votes.  Before we began this project, we expected that some of our subjects would feel this way, whether they voted for Obama or Romney.

As it turned out, we were correct - one of our subjects who voted for Obama felt that whether he voted or not, Romney would still win Texas comfortably, and so his vote was essentially meaningless to him.  Surprisingly though, one of our subjects who voted for Romney, provided the same reasoning but with a different angle.  Whether or not he voted, his preferred Presidential candidate would still win Texas.  In his instance, one more vote for Romney wouldn't have made any difference in the final outcome of the state's tally.

One of our subjects felt that the real problem is the Electoral College system. To him, this system amplified the voices of a few over the voices of the vast majority.

Additionally, while our group acknowledged the many pessimistic feelings about the voting system that citizens are under, it is both proper and necessary to be considerate of all of those people in our world who are voiceless - many of these people will live and die before they have a right to safely or legally voice their opinion in any way.

We should also salute all of those people of the generations who preceded us and fought and died for the right to vote that we have today.  The right to vote for all citizens (notably suffrage) was a battle that took over 150 years to win.  We are proud to have the opportunity to exercise this right.



Survey of New Belo Communication Building

By: Will Korn

I also conducted a video survey of UT's newest communication facility, the Belo Center for New Media, which was completed in the Fall of 2012. This video reveals some current communication students' opinions about the building where they take several of their classes.