Going into Monday night of the Democratic National Convention, there were a few pressing questions C.J. Getting wanted answered from people in power.
Scribbled down in a fresh Portage Reporter’s Notebook, the 17-year-old Naperville Central High School senior had at least four.
What are the biggest barriers to youth involvement in politics? What are legislators doing to increase youth voter turnout and engagement? How do you ensure that young voices are heard and represented in the policy making process? And what does President Joe Biden’s passing the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris mean for the future of youth voter engagement, with the party seemingly moving towards the next generation?
He read them aloud while sitting on a shuttle carrying delegates and media from McCormick Place — the primary daytime venue for convention ongoings — to nightly programming at the United Center on Chicago’s Near West Side.
Fellow Naperville Central senior Sarah Segvich sat next to him. Backpacks at their feet, they readied themselves to be inside the heart of the DNC, reporting on the speeches and happenings of the convention alongside journalists from the country’s biggest publications.
If they were nervous, they didn’t show it. No, like seasoned reporters, they were anxious to get the story.
Getting and Segwich were among more than 40 high school journalists from across Illinois chosen to report on the DNC in Chicago as fully credentialed media this week, the largest youth coverage there’s ever been in convention history, according to the local host committee.
In all, Naperville Central sent five reporters to the convention, including two recent graduates and three current students.
Getting is the operations managing editor for Naperville Central’s student newspaper, Central Times. Segvich is the paper’s content manager.
Central Times’ DNC coverage started midday Monday at Union Park, where thousands of pro-Palestinian and other demonstrators rallied before marching past the DNC headquarters. From there, they stopped by McCormick Place before heading over to the United Center.
The students’ plan for Monday and through the convention’s end Thursday was to report a youth perspective on the DNC, Getting said.
Asked about the importance of bringing young reporters like herself into the fold of DNC coverage — with some 15,000 journalists descending on the city to cover the week’s events and content creators having credentials for the first time in convention history — Segvich said she and the DNC’s youth press corps offer the unique opportunity to inform soon-to-be or new voters peer-to-peer.
“We have a lot of people in high school, like back at my school at Central, who probably don’t really care about the DNC going on, even though it’s right here,” she said. “But I think by us and other student journalists writing about it, in general it opens up the audience a ton.
“We just get a lot more people who are more aware of what’s happening or just getting information they wouldn’t otherwise be reading about.”
It’s about understanding and engagement, said Isabelle Leofanti, 17, a senior at Metea Valley High School in Aurora. Leofnati was one of three students that Metea Valley sent to cover the DNC, alongside senior Emily Peña and junior Dhiya Ashlyn Dhaya Sharmila.
“We’re trying to figure out (how) what’s going to be talked about at the DNC is going to affect us,” Leofanti said, speaking with her classmates in an interview ahead of the convention’s start last week. “I don’t think any of us can vote right now, but when we can vote, everything we hear and report on is going to be super important.”
Leofanti pointed to the cost of college, for instance, and how her coverage of the issue would be uniquely situated in feeling the weight of the problem herself and knowing what questions those her age want their lawmakers to answer about it.
“We share the perspective that The Washington Post or The New York Times or The Associated Press can’t,” Peña added. “This is our community. This is something that we’re living in.”
For their DNC coverage, the Metea reporters had planned on splitting stories up by topic, looking at how issues are raised and handled at the convention. Areas they wanted to focus on included school safety — specifically school shootings and gun policies in Illinois — as well as college debt forgiveness and mental health, they said.
Including Metea Valley and Naperville Central, 10 Illinois high schools had reporters on the DNC beat this week. Schools coordinated to do some reporting together but individually, they each had distinct plans for what they wanted to bring home to their campus publications, said Keith Carlson, head of the journalism program at Naperville Central.
Carlson joined Getting and Segvich at the United Center Monday. He acted, in part, as chaperone, but Carlson was also in attendance as the president of the Illinois Journalism Education Association.
Carlson and IJEA helped coordinate the DNC’s high school coverage.
Carlson said he was excited to see what his students come up with, noting he’d be at the DNC every day with a reporting team from the Central Times.
“There’s no need to write a story about what someone said in a speech, that’ll be covered on TV. That’ll be covered by professional media,” Carlson said. “So I’m curious to see what they’re going to do.”
Already though, he’s proud, he said.
“(My students) are really assertive. They know what they’re doing.”
A few hours into his first night at the United Center, Getting had proved Carlson right.
Face flushed — camera in hand — he wove through an ever-moving crowd bustling through the arena Monday. Pausing to check in briefly before heading out to find his next interview, he grinned widely.
“I’m feeling amazing,” he said. “I’ve gotten some really cool interviews. … I’ve talked to (conservative activist) Charlie Kirk, (Connecticut U.S. Rep.) Rosa DeLauro and (former Georgia state Rep.) Stacey Abrams.”
He got to ask his questions. “A full list,” Getting said. The conversations exceeded his expectations.
“I thought I’d get like a few state representatives. Never in my wildest dreams (did I think I’d speak to) literal senators, literal congressmen that are making a huge difference nationwide,” he said.
His first interview of the night was with Abrams.
“It was a train wreck,” Getting laughed, still smiling. “I was incredibly nervous. I stuttered every word.”
From there, he settled into a routine — and really started to have some fun. Up next, Getting was on a mission to track down Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, he said.
He looked around, the United Center still busy as ever around him, and set off.
