Election Night 2010

With our weekly broadcast being only 10 minutes long, the 8 hour election coverage seemed extremely ambitious. But we pulled it off and racked up 2000 unique user sessions! I’d like to thank everyone that was involved for doing such a great job.

Neither Brian or Chris were up in the gallery with us on the night, so I’m just going to give a short debrief on how things went from our perspective.

The first two hours went perfectly. Apart from the few technical difficulties that we experienced with the OB’s, things were smooth and everyone seemed calm and relaxed. Graham was certainly a hard act for Claire to follow, but she did wonderfully even when things started to go a bit wrong. One of the highlights for me was the on screen banter that was going on between Graham and Tom O, it made us chuckle up in the gallery!
Maddie did a great job with directing, as did Paul Wood and James Kenyon. Rob Anderson, having not worked the sound board ever before, managed to keep on top of the sound with only a few hiccups a long the way.

Our reporters out in the field did a top job. I was very impressed with Andrew and Luke's OB's especially as it was their first time reporting live on camera. Stu as usual did amazingly...and continued to report back even when we gone (hehehe!).

Seeing as we have another election now looming, there are things we can do to better prepare ourselves.
- Firstly, we need to start preparing our material, such as the issue VT’s and the constituency profiles, much earlier. It is essential to have these in the can days before we go live to allow time to rehearse.
- I'd like to have at least 4 hours long rehearsals during the few days preceding the election night, which will include EVERYONE...that means first years too. Everyone needs to know exactly how to do what they're doing so that we don't have problems with things like the autocue again.
- We need to brainstorm some ideas for other material to prepare. When we got to around 2am in the morning, when the counts were coming in, our constituency profiles were dropping like flies – leaving us with only the issues to play. Having some fresh material later on in the night may increase our traffic and lengthen the time people spend watching our broadcast.
- OB’s need to be tested before hand. A few of the OB’s had dodgy sound quality, which made them almost unusable.
- More studio guests need to be confirmed and be made aware that they will be required to stay until the early hours of the morning.
- We need to advertise heavily for the next one. I would like the see the amount of traffic at least doubled. That means we need posters and leaflets and a high level of distribution.
- Also, on the night, someone needs to take on the role of looking after the guests, maybe a first year?

I think we all learned a great deal and now that we know we can do it, we can only get better.