If you don't have time to tune into CNN, depending on your Blackberries for the latest election headlines might be better than you think.
According to CBS correspondent and 1995 Penn alumna Nancy Cordes, the role of often-overlooked online reporters has never been more important.
"The Web is having an impact [on the primaries] like never before," she said in a talk at the Kelly Writer's House yesterday. "I think some of the best political reporting has been on the Web."
Cordes was invited to campus by Penn professor and Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Dick Polman to give an insider's look at life as a journalist in the midst of what many - including Cordes herself - are hailing as a "historic" primary season.
There is hardly a better person from whom to get this perspective: Cordes spent two and a half months on the campaign trail with Mike Huckabee, in addition to covering Senator John McCain and Democratic hopefuls. She even attended the same high school as Senator Barack Obama, and they coincidentally had the same homeroom teacher.
"I really think this has been a tremendous campaign to cover," she said, citing that all the candidates are "really fascinating people," and public interest is higher than ever.
"People are so invested in this race - people are hungry for information, and that's what makes it so fun to cover," she said.
Cordes added that part of what makes this election season unique is that there is a genuine interest in "substantive differences" between candidates and that "the public's appetite for negative campaigning" is much lower than it was in "the Monica Lewinsky era" of politics.
For the benefit of the visiting class of 9th graders from Saucon Valley High School, Cordes took a break from discussing politics to provide insight to her career path and life as a broadcast journalist.
"I've had a lot of jobs where I had to get up in the middle of the night" in order to do the early morning news, she reflected. "You get good experience at these because there is a skeleton staff," in which you bear more responsibility than you would with a full staff, she said.
Ninth-grader Erica Weisbach found Cordes particularly interesting, saying, "I thought [the talk] was great. She has such an amazing career, and she's really lucky to be able to do that."
Cordes agrees, saying, "it was always my dream to cover politics" and that despite the long hours on the road, there "is no substitute for being out there and writing the first version of history."
