UW-Milwaukee will walk into the national spotlight Thursday night when Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders debate at the University’s Zelazo Center. They will travel to Milwaukee fresh from the New Hampshire primary.
More than 400 journalists from across the globe are expected to cover the Democratic debate. PBS is host. University employees are spending the week making preparations.
A handful of UWM workers were cranking up a platform in the Union Ballroom. This is where hundreds of reporters will watch Thursday night’s debate on large screen TVs, because there’s no room for the media at the Zelazo Center across the street.
When the platform was high enough, workers took down the lights. A company was coming in next to install special lighting to accommodate the reporters who will file stories during and after the Democratic debate.
PBS Senior Producer James Blue is keeping an eye on the activity. He says UW-Milwaukee provided the most attractive place for the debate.
“It’s a public state institution, public broadcasting, we think our missions are aligned and we thought it would be a wonderful way and a statement to do something like this at a public university, a public facility, a debate for the American public,” Blue says.
Blue says PBS also considered Marquette University and the Milwaukee Art Museum as sites. Tom Luljak is thrilled that UWM was chosen. He’s Vice Chancellor of University Relations. Luljak says he can’t wait to hear the university’s name mentioned hundreds of times in the next few days.
“It always is nice when you’re able to have this enormous concentration of reporters covering an event on your campus. It’s likely that people around the world will see the UWM logo and hear the name mentioned in story after story after story,” Luljak says.
Luljak says UWM signed a contract with PBS that will allow the network to use campus facilities. In exchange, the university will receive about $50,000 in room rental fees, for labor and for staffing the event. Yet Luljak seems more excited about non-tangibles. Perhaps a post-debate bounce, similar to what happened when the UWM Men’s basketball team made it to the Sweet 16 a few years ago.
“We saw applications to the university spike. You suddenly become part of the conversation, a conversation you might not have been involved in if your name wasn’t out there,” Luljak says.
The University of Colorado-Boulder saw a bounce when it hosted a GOP debate in October. Spokesman Ryan Huff says the event definitely helped boost the university’s national profile.
“Our applications are up this year, but we’ve had success with other branding campaigns. It’s difficult to quantify it, but all I know is we’ve had about $4 million of earned media exposure and we had 14 million people watching the debate and that certainly didn’t hurt us,” Huff says.
Here in Milwaukee, PBS plans to stick around until Friday, when it will broadcast its “Washington Week” program from the Zelazo Center. In the meantime, UWM’s Tom Luljak predicts the food court at the Student Union will rake in big money this week, as hungry and thirsty network staff and laborers indulge their appetites.
