Primary Wrap-up / “Mendocino County Disaster Response” Mock Meeting
This part of our Election 2018 coverage is a distillation of the other forms and modalities we encountered on the campaign trail. The purpose of this exercise is to give these candidates for the seat a different sort of challenge. This is intended to see how well the candidates are at forming consensus and leading a meeting. Each candidate portrayed their personal style of leadership while working through a current subject before the current elected board. I believe I gained more understanding of each candidate watching them engage in this form of mock governance than subjecting them to another endless barrage of questions from individuals with a narrow agenda in mind.
We have met all of these candidates numerous times throughout the campaign, including interviewing them in our studio in the Company Store, and have become friends with all of them. We have all existed as a small traveling gaggle of candidates and press, hopping from Elk to Anderson Valley, Fort Bragg, Manchester, Ukiah, Caspar, Willits, Hopland and Mendocino. During this media blitz we have watched these candidates change from bright eyed novices, ready to campaign, to travel weary veterans of the campaign trail. Their positions have evolved and become more nuanced while, in some cases even moving to another perspective. This is what close contact does to you when you are exposed to the public, as these candidates have been.
It has been a learning curve for me also and I would like to record my impressions from behind the camera. Initially Skip Taube, host of Naturally Mendocino, Marianne McGee, host of Building Healthy Communities and I were discussing the upcoming elections and agreed to make a concerted effort to engage and educate our community as best we could. Skip later came up with the idea to do a “Job Interview,” to see how much the candidates knew of the area they were campaigning to represent. The process wasn’t done like this before. Everyone assumed the candidates knew this info or would learn it on the job. This put the candidates into research mode and accelerated the understanding they came to gain of their constituency and their issues. After a myriad meet & greets, barbeques, mixers and individual interviews They refined their platforms even finer while gaining endorsements and reading every sort of mis-characterization of themselves in the press, social media or radio. It takes a toll on your life, family and friends to go on a campaign.
This is the beginning of a new type of media coverage. With all of our stutters, fits and failures in providing live meetings we have succeeded almost half of the time in getting some form of Live Broadcast going. This has been difficult on our audience. Sometimes they get notified that something is going live only to find that it crashed. Still, while failing half of the time, we also succeed half of the time. Our Timberwolves Football coverage is the best you can find for high school sports in the nation. We have had a 90% success rate and getting better Livestreaming.
We want to thank our viewers for their patience and assure you that we are just as frustrated on the other end when the connection fails. Still, we always re post the recording within a day of the event. We have moved into a new host / provider relationship with Vimeo whom purchased LiveStream. Please bear with us as we make the changeover. This is a young platform that has some bugs to work out.
