28 Universities from across Australia are coming together to collaborate on UniPollWatch, a program that will provide coverage of all 150 House of Representative seats up for election later this year.

UniPollWatch is a cross-campus student journalism project dedicated to providing an in-depth and electorate specific information resource for voters in the lead up to the 2016 Federal election.

The innovative program will see universities from each state and the capital territory report on a number of designated electorates, covering important policy areas, individual candidates and historical voting behaviour.

La Trobe University’s involvement in the project will see a group of more than 20 students cover six electorates: La Trobe, Bendigo, McEwan, Scullin, Batman and Jagajaga.

To launch La Trobe’s involvement in UniPollWatch the team hosted a panel discussion last week, featuring a number of leading political journalists and analysts discussing how they cover elections, and what journalists can expect in 2016.

The panel featured upstart’s own Lawrie Zion, who led a discussion between Tony Walker from the Australian Financial Review; Josh Gordon, the Age’s State Political Editor; Erik Locke, a former State Secretary for the ALP and David Broadbent, a former Channel 9 Political Editor.

If you missed the action last week check out the highlight reel below, which features some of the best moments from the launch event.

 Matthew Elmas is a final year journalism major at La Trobe University, he is also part of the UniPollWatch team. You can follow him on twitter: @mjelmas