Fundamentals of Journalism Blog

President Obama and Mitt Romney get ready to face off in their first debate tonight, October 3^rd, in Denver, Colorado at the University of Denver.  The candidates also have two other debates scheduled until November 6^th.

This article talks about how the president and Romney prepared for this debate.  Romney faced 19 debates during primaries earlier in the year where as Obama hasn’t had a face-to-face debate with anyone since he was running against Arizona Sen. John McCain in 2008.  When practicing for the debate Obama brought in Massachusetts Senator John Kerry and Romney chose Ohio Senator Rob Portman to represent the president.

As this story made it clear, according to opinion polls, President Obama has an advantage over the nation and the majority of the swing states where the outcome between the candidates will likely be decided.

With voting day less than five weeks away now, these debates could possibly make or break the decision for whom to choose as president for some people.

I believe this article is news related because the presidential elections is something that news teams cover every day and it’s a topic that is very interesting to people.  Who the better candidate is for president is a debatable issue between voters so sometimes news stories can help them with arguments they make towards one another.

With this article though, I find that as you read it, it seems as if the debate has already happened.  Since this was posted around 4:15 pm on Wednesday, October 3^rd, and the debate doesn’t start until 7:30 pm tonight, it seems as if boston.com news missed something.  It appears as if they either accidently published this story already or wrote the story in past tense which makes it seems as if it’s already happened.

http://www.boston.com/news/politics/2012/10/03/first-debate-sets-moment-high-risk-theater/osKwTZ1TWStSKB0WXivxdI/story.html

UPDATE: I checked back on this article around 8 pm and the news story had been updated to a story that seems to preview the debate rather than talk as if it already happened, which was the way the story was earlier this afternoon.