Student Spotlight: Danielle Blyn

Newhouse student Danielle Blyn likes to stay busy covering politics.  

In the span of a year, Blyn wrote about Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley in New Hampshire during the 2024 presidential primary; covered the Democratic National Convention last summer in Chicago; and spent the Fall 2024 semester in the Newhouse DC program, interning in the communications department of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. 

In between, the junior also became the first Syracuse University student to earn a prestigious White House Correspondents’ Association scholarship and get a taste of life as a White House reporter. The experience allowed Blyn to travel to Washington a year ago to meet with White House correspondents, meet with an advisor to former President Joe Biden in the White House briefing room and even attend the White House Correspondents’ dinner.  

“I got to meet with so many people who had unique backgrounds and stories [of how they got] to where they were in their career,” said Blyn, a dual major in magazine, news and digital journalism at Newhouse and political science at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.  

“I also am still using those connections to this day, staying in touch with many of them and making sure I have a sense of what is going on in D.C, even if I am not there.” 

Blyn traces her interest in politics back to her childhood growing up in Southern California. She remembers how the 2020 election solidified her decision to write about politics, especially on the local scale.  

“I love that I can connect with real people,” she said of local reporting. “I think it’s been really forgotten that the people in politics are also real people, and the things they’re doing affect real people.” 

Blyn has also taken advantage of extracurricular opportunities at Syracuse University to hone her writing and expand her skill set. She works as news director for student-run radio station WJPZ (Z89); serves as head writer for “Unpeeled,” a late-night entertainment show on student-run CitrusTV; and volunteers as a journalist for public radio station WAER.  

She relies on a simple philosophy to help her take advantage of opportunities. 

“I think my biggest thing is don’t say ‘no.’ And I know that’s really cliché, but if someone is offering you something, don’t say no,” Blyn said.  

After covering Haley during the New Hampshire primary for The Times and Democrat newspaper of Orangeburg, South Carolina—which is close to Haley’s hometown of Bamberg— Blyn offered to cover the DNC for them.  

The paper took up the offer. She said her Newhouse experience and unique love for local politics helped her stand out.  

“It was a lot of blind faith in me, and [the editor] saying ‘Well, if [your article] is not good, we just won’t publish it,’ and me being OK with that,” Blyn said. “And just accepting that it might not be perfect, and it’s definitely going to get massive editing.” 

But the articles were good. She wrote about eight stories for the paper over the four-day convention, which she attended with other Newhouse students during a reporting trip led by Joel Kaplan, a professor of magazine, news and digital journalism and associate dean of graduate programs at Newhouse.

“I just came [into the DNC] and said, ‘I’m a student, I’m hoping to learn, and I’m not going to be perfect, but I am young, and I do have a different perspective,’” she said. After graduating in May 2026, Blyn hopes to start at small, local publications and later, perhaps cover Congress or the White House.  

She has had a taste of life in Washington, after all, through the Newhouse School. When Blyn chose Newhouse in 2022, she knew it was a place that provided opportunities to get real-life journalistic experience as soon as she arrived on campus. A moment at Z89 in her first year reflected what her time at Newhouse would become: saying “yes” to opportunities. 

“I think hearing myself on air within the first month of being here… was like, ‘OK, I can actually do this,’ and it’s not like a pipe dream I’m having,” Blyn said. “I felt like I could be a journalist and go and do so many different things.”