After more than 50 years of closed-door editorial board interviews with presidential candidates, The Nashua (N.H.) Telegraph 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 of 18 editorial board candidate interviews took place at Nashua High School South September 24. Students in the two-year video production and broadcast class recorded the interview in the school’s television studio, and streamed it live over the Web. The live stream was accessible through the Nashua newspaper’s Web site.
The following is part of an e-mail interview with Managing Editor/Online Damon Kiesow of The Nashua Telegraph.
Q: Why did you choose to partner with the high school?
A: We have been aware of the TV production classes at the High School for a while and finally made it over for a visit last month. They have a $1 million TV studio and were very interested in forming a partnership with the Telegraph in order to provide some professional mentoring opportunities for the students. After seeing the facility and the talent level of the students, we pitched holding the editorial boards there.
What are the benefits and drawbacks of that partnership?
There are few if any drawbacks. The biggest challenge for us is scheduling. The students do have other classes to attend, so we try and arrange the interviews around the school periods to minimize disruption. The benefit is we get to work with some great students and take advantage of a fantastic facility. They are able to stream live video as well as provide as digital video files and DVDs for us to use in encoding the show for use on-demand on our site. The students also have access to some very experienced TV professionals (including their teacher Jim Pfeiffer) who have worked with them on everything from lighting to floor direction.
What have you learned from the first two interviews with candidates Obama and Tancredo? What will you do differently as you move ahead with the other sixteen interviews?
We are very happy with the results so far. For the Telegraph staff - there is almost no difference in how we need to operate in the studio as opposed to our regular edit board at the office. We even shipped our 14-foot conference table to the school for the duration. The only 'new' requirement for us is to get to the studio 20 minutes before broadcast, get mic'ed up - and sit up straight on camera. 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.
Do you know how many people are viewing the live stream of the interviews online and watching the archived video after the event is over? If so, is that more or fewer people than you expected?
We had a peak of 14 viewers for the live stream for Tancredo - and 24 for Obama. We did not market the stream heavily the first time - as we did not know it would all work for sure. We will be getting the word out more effectively moving forward. Tancredo had 500 on-demand streams in a week - and Obama just went live today.
What else would you like to add?
The partnership is allowing us to provide a product to the community we could not have offered on our own. Our previous effort would have allowed a single camera static shot - and probably video segments of 5 - 10 minutes - not a full hour. As well, 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.
** For more on this project, read the latest Snapshot from the Edge: "Telegraph, High School Partner to Open Editorial Board Interviews".