In Focus

A newspaper and high school team up to offer presidential candidate interviews.

By Beth Lawton

First Published: Fall 2007

After more than 50 years of closed-door editorial board interviews with presidential candidates, The Telegraph in Nashua, N.H., opened the process by partnering with a local high school to feature streaming live video of the events on the newspaper’s Web site.

The first interview, with U.S. Rep Tom Tancredo, R.-Colo., took place at Nashua High School South on Sept. 24. Students in the two-year video production and broadcast class recorded the interview in the school’s studio and streamed it live over the Web. The live stream video was accessible through the newspaper’s Web site.

The school and newspaper then collaborated on an interview with U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. Plans call for completing the remaining candidate interviews before the state’s primary in February.

The Telegraph intentionally did not heavily market the live stream of the first interview “as we did not know it would all work for sure,” says Damon Kiesow, managing editor for online. It had just 14 viewers at its peak, but Kiesow says Web site visitors viewed the on-demand video of Tancredo’s interview 500 times in the first week.

Teacher Jim Pfeiffer says the newspaper and school initially talked about partnering on projects earlier this year. The idea of live-streaming the candidate interviews did not come up until Kiesow first saw the school’s studio a little more than two weeks before the initial interview.
The studio, built in 2004, has three cameras, lavaliere microphones, a mixer and a control room. Several dozen juniors and seniors take the video production and broadcast class, so there is no shortage of talent for the newspaper project. Pfeiffer, who has years of experience in TV production work, supervises.

The logistics of coordinating schedules of candidates and students is one of the only drawbacks to the partnership, Kiesow says. Fortunately, most teachers are understanding and have given students permission to be in the studio for some of the interviews.

The Tancredo interview posed a special challenge, as the hour-long event ran through a class period change. Some students had to turn over production to others without interrupting the flow of the event.

“We practiced it a couple of times before we did the actual interviews,” Pfeiffer says.

For the Telegraph’s editorial board, the process wasn’t that much different than a regular editorial board meeting. The newspaper shipped its large conference table to the school for the interview.

“The only ‘new’ requirement for us is to get to the studio 20 minutes before broadcast, get miked up and sit up straight on camera,” Kiesow says. “The students are definitely still learning the process and getting used to applying their skills in ‘real time,’ but the first two events have gone extremely well.”
The partnership has benefited both sides, Kiesow says. “The partnership is allowing us to provide a product to the community we could not have offered on our own. … It has been a lot of fun working with the class; they take this very seriously and we are learning a lot from them, and vice versa.”
Pfeiffer says he had absolutely no reservations about working with the newspaper, especially on the candidate interviews.

“These are clearly working journalists in the real world, and I have students very interested in journalism as a career,” Pfeiffer says. “So the fact that they are literally producing the program, and it’s a serious, no-kidding-around program, works for me from a curriculum and a value point of view.”

NAA Manager of Digital Media Beth Lawton can be reached at beth.lawton@naa.org. This is a condensed version of a longer article from NAA’s Digital Edge. To read the entire article or the transcript of an e-mail interview with Damon Kiesow, visit the Digital Edge blog at www.naa.org/blog/digitaledge/index.cfm.