It was a busy morning for Sky News Australia Washington correspondent Annalise Nielsen when Mediaweek caught up with her. She was in Washington DC for the final few days of the US presidential campaign.
She had just done a cross to the Sky News breakfast show hosted by Peter Stefanovic. However, the breakfast anchor was also in the US, on this morning reporting on the election from Arizona.
Nielsen will be co-anchoring the channel’s election coverage as the votes are counted. She will be on a rooftop location backing onto the Capitol Building, working alongside Paul Murray.
Nielsen often crosses live to Murray’s Sky News primetime program. She shared with him earlier this week how many of the locals feel about the drawn-out campaigning.
“Everyone is looking forward to this election being over,” Nielsen told Mediaweek.
“Trump has now been campaigning for two years. When you travel around the swing states in the US there are non-stop advertising text messages. People are really getting worn out with it.”
Nielsen has been covering the US for Sky News since mid-2020, just over three years after she joined the channel.
Annelise Nielsen at a Trump rally
She’s hoping this will be a long-term appointment. Nielsen met the man who became her husband after she arrived. “I love living in DC and covering US politics,” she said.
“It’s just it’s always so interesting and it’s always so consequential to what happens and it matters to the rest of the world. There’s so much history to it. I find it fascinating.
“Living in DC you just feel like you’re in the heart of everything.”
Engaging with a YouTube audience
One thing Sky News Australia has done in recent years is build a big US audience watching on YouTube. Something that’s very apparent when Nielsen travels the country.
“When we travel people do know Sky News. Even when we were in Erie, Pennsylvania at the early voting line, there were people who recognised Sky News and were interacting with our content.
“It’s really cool knowing what we’re doing is reaching such a global audience. It gives us new opportunities for storytelling which at the heart of everything we do in journalism.”
Avoiding the press pack
“We really try and avoid the main campaign,” Nielsen explained.
“The feedback we get from our viewers is everyone sees all of that as a huge press pack following all the big events. We get a lot more value going out and talking to the real people and it’s something that not a lot of outlets do or do well.
“We really prioritise hearing from real Americans and talking about what’s influencing people out in the real world. As much as you might have a strong message put through campaign ads and rallies, when you talk to people just one-on-one you find what’s really influencing them.”
Is there a normal day on the Washington beat?
“We tend to have the mornings to ourselves. Things pick up around lunchtime and I’m doing Australian breakfast TV mid-afternoon going through to the evening. It’s definitely not the most social job I’ve ever had – quite the contrary.
“You have to work twice as hard as everyone else in America because you have to always make the case about why they’d want to speak to foreign news. Explain what our audience is like and why we are interested in these stories. They often ask, is the rest of the world really that interested in what we do and I have to tell them yes, the entire world is obsessed with what’s happening here.”
While working as a video correspondent sometimes means lugging all the gear yourself, Nielsen has been spoilt recently.
“For this campaign, I have had a camera operator I’ve been working with for five weeks. Normally when I’m in DC, I work out of the Fox News bureau and I use their studio. I used to do more video journalism and I’ve kind of taken a step back from that because it’s just a very hard job.”
Nielsen hasn’t applied for any leave just yet. The post-election climate could be even wilder than what we’re going through now.
Then there is the change of power in January. Whatever happens, there will be a new president.
Nielsen: “Oh my god, this is going to be the first female president or Donald Trump is coming back for the first non-consecutive term since Grover Cleveland. That will be the ultimate comeback story of our time. It promises to be an amazing inauguration either way.”
Sky News lands in the USA
A planeload of Nielsen’s colleagues arrived in the US this week, spreading out across different parts of the US.
“It’s really nice having everyone here and we work so well as a team,” Nielsen said. “There are no egos and everyone is pitching in and pulling together to put out the best product. We are really hitting the battleground states and I don’t think any other Australian outlet is really doing what we are doing.”
See also: Sky News unveils dedicated international election channel