As the presidential candidates fight for their respective party’s nomination, a Kirkland student is among the reporters covering the campaign.
Gabryelle Matz-Carter, a 16-year-old junior at Lake Washington High School and class president, will be covering the presidential election race through Envision’s Chase the Race 2016, which was created for students to participate in the political process and encourage youth to get involved as well.
Matz-Carter, who is interested in pursuing law, said she first learned about the initiative through another one of Envision’s programs at Stanford, after which the opportunity came available.
Although journalism and law may not seem related, she said her passion for one spilled over to the other.
“I feel that law and reporting and journalism became kind of easy connection piece between the two,” she said. “It kind of all ties in together. I feel like laws are the language of politics. That’s the lingo they’re using. That’s my translation factor. I think law is a huge factor in that and the foundation of it.”
She also was interested in getting involved due to her current involvement politically on a hyper-local level as class president.
“I’ve always been interested in social justice and what’s going on,” she said. “You have all these top politicians trying to make changes. I’m really used to being a voice for the crowd and a voice for student body.”
She’ll also be reporting on the final Democratic debate March 9, where she’ll get a chance to interview a candidate, depending on who has made it that far.
“That will be kind of my huge moment,” she said.
As part of it, she will be splicing footage of people from across the country sharing their thoughts about the election. One of her hopes is to be able to reach out to fellow youth by taking a more nontraditional approach to reporting.
“Kids aren’t necessarily in tune with watching the actual debates constantly,” she said. “But they are able to feed into that by using different social media networks. Twitter, Instagram, Vine, Snapchat. It’s just a lot of different ways for them to capture the youth in politics.”
