2008 Woodie Awards
Vote Absentee
URI graduate joins MTV's Choose or Lose team as citizen journalist
Joe Markman
Issue date: 1/25/08 Section: News
|
In 1992, when Shevlin was 11 years, his father talked about the presidential election and Shevlin fondly remembers debates at the kitchen table over the national issues of the day.
At 16, Shevlin, whose great-grandfather published the Providence Journal, was a senate page for former U.S. Sen. John Chafee (R-RI).
"Most kids were in school and we were on the Senate floor," Shevlin said.
Today Shevlin is one of 51 citizen journalists for the MTV Choose or Lose initiative. As a recent student of URI and a young person with experience in both politics and journalism, Shevlin was selected this past fall to report on the 2008 presidential campaign on MTV's think.mtv.com Web site.
Last fall Shevlin was searching on a journalist jobs Web site and came across an advertisement for the program. He applied, and two months later, after a lengthy Internet application process, got the job.
On his section of the site, Shevlin posts regular blogs about the presidential campaign from the perspective of a young Rhode Islander. He also riffs on issues ranging from the state's budget deficit to the problem of population loss. Shevlin believes that to understand national issues fully, people have to understand local politics.
"Local news, Rhode Island politics - those are always the kind of issues that have the most impact," he said.
Nine months ago, prior to Shevlin's involvement with Choose or Lose, he created the R.I. Report, a Web site that Shevlin describes as kind of like the Huffington Post. It combines news from local sources and from the blogosphere. He tries to stress the "purity of news" on the site, something that Shevlin has increasingly focused on since he ran R.I. Attorney General candidate Bill Harsch's campaign in 2006.
"I know how to spin people, and I know when I've been spun," Shevlin said.