Ventnor West Ward Election 2007

We decided to cover the Ventnor West Ward election in 2007 as if it were a General Election. It was way over the top and we knew it. It was more about experimenting with how a local or hyperlocal publication might cover elections in an online age.

You’ll be able to understand the details of what we did by reading this post, but in summary:-

• – We setup a special area of the forum called Candidates Corner. We used this to source questions to ask the candidates. We were surprised that some of the discussions had 10k+ views – pretty amazing for a town of five thousand people.
• – Candidates were given the opportunity to layout what they could do for the Ward and published them as separate, unfiltered articles.
• – Questions, sourced from the board on our Forum were then we taken to each of the Candidates for them to answer on video(Shot by local man Nige – Thanks Nige!). Nige then worked hard and edited them into separate video for each of the questions. Each of the video answers were then published in the build up to the elections.
• – We even covered the results live!

How did it work?
This might be of interest: The candidates speaking about how they’ve found the election being covered online, in the way we did.