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Contents Feature Stories Journalism student snaps viral photo Geography student’s beaver research UWM scientists study COVID-19 English professor maps indigenous nations Anthropology alum is Army archaeologist
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When Patricia McKnight went to vote on April 7 and snapped a picture of the long line and one voter’s sign of frustration at the polling station, she didn’t know how much the image would resonate with people across the country. McKnight, a senior at UWM majoring in English and Journalism, Advertising and Media Studies (JAMS), recently started an internship at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. When she went to Washington High School to vote during the Wisconsin presidential primary, she asked her supervisors at the Journal Sentinel if they wanted a picture, and they said yes. McKnight stopped when she saw a sign that read “This is ridiculous.” She talked to the woman, Jennifer Taff, who had requested an absentee ballot but never received it. Instead, Taff had to vote in person amid the coronavirus outbreak, a risk she didn’t want to take since her father has a lung disease, McKnight said. The photo was used in a Journal Sentinel story about Wisconsin’s voting scene on April 7, and it quickly went viral. Don Moynihan, a professor at Georgetown University, called it “an era-defining image,” a phrase that has stuck with the picture. The photo was used by news outlets across the country, including MSNBC, NBC, CNN, USA Today and Slate, among others. The Journal Sentinel featured it on its home page all afternoon April 7 and much of the day April 8, and put it on the front page of April 8’s print edition. The photo was being shared thousands of times on Twitter, but McKnight didn’t have an account. She rectified that the afternoon of the election, and 24 hours later @ Pmcknightnews had more than 7,000 Twitter followers. On April 8, she talked about the experience. How did the picture come about? I was just going on my way to vote – that’s it. It wasn’t an assignment or anything. I saw the very, very long line, and I started walking towards the back of the line. I saw the woman standing there with the sign, and I asked her a couple of questions about the sign because it was like, “Yes, it is ridiculous.” What is it about this picture that you think has caught so much attention?
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Our JAMS professors tell us to make sure the lighting is right, to make sure the person is centered when you’re using the “rule of thirds,” so I did all of that and I thought “oh, this is a good picture,” but I didn’t know it was the picture. But just the message – you see every single
