Which parties and candidates are taking part in the A Little Bit of Stone video Q&A event, answering YOUR direct questions?
As part of our election coverage, we’ve invited all parties and candidates to take part in recorded Q&A sessions to directly answer questions from the public.
All four Conservative candidates (County Council Rural and Urban, Police, Fire and Crime Commissioner and Stonefield and Christchurch by-election) have declined to take part in this video element of our video coverage over concerns of perceived bias, format and the editing necessary to create our finished presentation.
I’m pleased to say that all other parties and candidates, for who we have candidate profiles have confirmed that they will take part subject to their availability. You can find the full list of parties and candidates over on our dedicated – candidate page
[box type=”info” align=”alignleft” class=”” width=””]Personal Note from Editor Jon Cook – We’re in our 11th year of providing coverage of all aspects of our town. We do this in a non-partisan way and hope that we have demonstrated our neutrality throughout this time delivering factual information in an accessible format.
We ran a successful live husting for the 2019 general election however for the 2021 elections things have to be different for both personal reasons and due to Covid restrictions. We’d have loved to do live hustings in person or online for 2021 – and initially kicked off with this idea – however due to my real job commitments that hasn’t been possible to accommodate in 2021.
Rest assured we will continue to be transparent, unbiased and accountable for our output throughout the election as we are with all of our content.[/box]
This element of our election coverage looks to move past campaign soundbites and for our readers and followers to get some real detail on candidates proposals. Overwhelmingly from the questions submitted that’s what people want to know, how will x deliver y?
Members of the public have sent us many questions, covering a wide range of topics and as outlined here the format will be:
- Solo Zoom video with myself, Jon Cook, and the candidate
- 2 minute timed opening statement from the candidate
- Questions that the candidates have seen in advance – 60 seconds to answer each question
- Questions that the candidate hasn’t seen in advance – 60 seconds to answer each question
- 2 minute timed closing speech
The format of the event is to see how the candidates work on delivering concise answers to questions. By splitting questions into ones they’ve seen and ones they haven’t the public is able to compare and see how well the candidate can think on their feet and whether they can deliver a convincing answer.
The questions asked will be a mixture of publicly submitted questions as well as some questions from ourselves.
Over the next week, we will begin the zoom videos with each candidate, after which we will “cut” the candidates timed answers into separate files so that our final video presentation for each question will look like this:
- Audio of the host reading the question
- Visual of the question on the screen
- Each candidate’s answer to that question
- An on-screen countdown timer will be included in the video for each answer
- Onto the next question
To be clear there will be no editing of the answers themselves, the only editing will be cutting the candidates answers to allow them to be pieced together in the final videos.
One of our key aims is to make all of our content as accessible as possible, so as well as the video we will be:
- Transcribing the answers into written form
- Time coding of the questions so that users can access the content they may be most interested in – this proved particularly popular in our 2019 General Election video
- Subtitles on the video answers
If you feel that we can do more to make the content accessible please email elections@alittlebitofstone.com
