Snapshots from the Edge: Telegraph, High School Partner To Open Editorial Board Interviews

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 Telegraph intentionally did not heavily market the live-streaming video of the first interview, Nashua Telegraph Managing Editor for Online Damon Kiesow said, “as we did not know it would all work for sure.”

The live-stream of the first interview, with U.S. Rep Tom Tancredo, had just 14 viewers at its peak. Kiesow said the Telegraph Web site visitors viewed the on-demand video of Tancredo’s interview 500 times in the first week. Twenty-four people watched the live interview with U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) live, and Kiesow expects many more viewers for the on-demand Obama video interview.

“We will be getting the word out more effectively moving forward,” Kiesow said, since the project is working so well.

Video production and broadcast teacher Jim Pfeiffer said the newspaper and school first talked about partnering on projects, such as having students do video news reports for the newspaper’s Web site, earlier this year. The idea of live-streaming the candidate debates did not come up until Kiesow first saw the studio, a little more than two weeks before the first interview.

The high school’s television studio, built in 2004, has three cameras in a studio configuration, lavaliere microphones, a mixer and control room. There are several dozen 11th and 12th grade students in the video production and broadcast class, so there is no shortage of talent for the newspaper project. Pfeiffer, who has years of experience in television production work, is supervising.

The logistics of coordinating the schedules of busy candidates with the student’s class schedules is one of the only drawbacks to the partnership, Kiesow said. Fortunately, most teachers at the high school are understanding and have given their students permission to be in the studio for some of the interviews.

The interview with Tancredo took place in the middle of the school day because he already had a jam-packed schedule. The timing posed a special logistical challenge, as the hour-long event would run through a high school class period change, and some students would have to turn over production to other students without interrupting the flow of the event.

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

The output from the control room, Pfeiffer explained, goes to a computer that encodes the stream with Windows Media encoder software. The encoded broadcast goes to a Windows Media broadcast server and then to the Web.

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 mic'ed up - and sit up straight on camera,” Kiesow said. 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 between the newspaper and the high school has brought benefits to both sides, Kiesow said. “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.”

Pfeiffer said he had absolutely no reservations about working with the newspaper, especially on the candidate interview project. “These are clearly working journalists in the real world, and I have students very interested in journalism as a career,” Pfeiffer said. “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.”

Several of the 12th grade students working on the program are either already 18 years old or about to turn 18, and they are learning a lot about each candidate before voting for the first time. “The students are absolutely thrilled to be doing this,” Pfeiffer said.

The Telegraph plans to complete the remaining 16 presidential candidate interviews before the state’s primary in February.

In addition to streaming the video live and posting the full video to the newspaper’s Web site, newspaper staffers write several articles about each interview and the Web site features an events calendar with candidate appearances, a “Prime Cuts” blog and more.

Pfeiffer said the high school and the newspaper plan to continue working together long after the primary, with students providing some news and feature video stories to the newspaper Web site.

For the transcript of an e-mail interview with Damon Kiesow about the project, see the Digital Edge blog.

Snapshots from the Edge focus on new projects and initiatives on the digital side of newspaper publishing. If your company is launching a new feature or site, please let us know - we may feature your project in an upcoming article. E-mail Beth Lawton, manager, digital media at beth.lawton@naa.org.