RPV Convention Embraces New Media
By Greg L | 2 June 2009 | RPV, Blogs | 13 Comments
The convention of the Republican Party of Virginia was an awesome event, although I had little time to take much of it in. The RPV New Media Committee through sponsorship from the House Republican Caucus engaged me in streaming the convention live on ustream as well as running a mini-studio on the floor of the convention. Bloggers used that studio to interview a wide variety of Republican elected officials and candidates with the convention floor and stage as a backdrop, which allowed for some pretty awesome video footage. It kept me awfully busy, so I missed a lot of what was happening, but the results of the effort are tremendous.
On Saturday we had over 13,000 viewers on the ustream feed, and I produced twenty two videos that are now showing up on blogs across the Commonwealth that will help voters get to know the Republican candidates and what they stand for. At no other time has any political party anywhere provided such access and support to new media, and the results clearly demonstrate that these candidates are very connected with the regular folks who interviewed them. The interviews are rarely as slick as those typically done by professional journalists, and sometimes the rather challenging environment at the convention caused some significant production problems, but these videos have that look and feel of a regular voter talking to their local candidate and getting the answers to their questions. I am confident they will make a measurable difference in their races.
One of my favorites is the interview that Tom White of Virginia Right! did with Rusty McGuire, who is running in the 55th District.
Just regular folks telling great stories. There was a lot of that at this convention, from the podium all the way back to the mini-studio. Some of the best stories came from political newcomers like Ernesto Sampson, Jay McConville and Barbara Comstock, all of whom had some inspiring stories to tell. To see them all, Too Conservative has aggregated all of the videos on one page, which makes it easy. Definitely check them out.
To get an idea of what this looked like, some friends at the convention took some pictures of the studio in action. You can see from them just how extraordinarily accommodating RPV was to the new media, giving the studio terrific placement on the floor of the convention and some superb logistical support. I’ve never seen RPV or any other organization ever make such an investment supporting in new media. The usual treatment is to simply provide media credentials to bloggers, but RPV went way beyond that giving new media the logistical support they can’t afford to have that the traditional media always has available to them. Bloggers showed up with someone to interview, and lights, sound and cameras were ready to go, and after the convention they got an edited video that included their own graphics. The days of the love-hate relationship between RPV and bloggers is definitively over.
I ran into Ben Tribbett of Not Larry Sabato on Friday evening as he was lurking around and told him about what we were doing. He was immediately dismissive of the effort, but couldn’t recall the Democratic Party of Virginia ever coming close to providing this level of support for the new media. I didn’t have a chance to ask him whether DPVA had ever provided facilities for him to interview candidates on the floor of a convention, as I’ve never seen him or any of his colleagues appear in any video like the ones we shot, but he walked off before I could ask. I ran into him again on the floor on Saturday, surprisingly in the restricted area around the studio. That would have been a nice opportunity to get his impressions on what we were doing, but unfortunately I was right in the middle something and I didn’t have any time to talk to him.
I imagine right now blogs from the other side of the aisle are wondering just how the Republican Party managed to leapfrog them so far in supporting the new media. Maybe Dickie Cranwell and the rest of the bigwigs at DPVA can’t tolerate anything they can’t thoroughly and completely control, but given what I’ve seen from those folks, maybe it’s a good idea for DPVA to keep the lefty blogs at arm’s length.
UPDATE: SWAC Girl has more pics and coverage of RPV getting in the game. Looks like their outreach is paying some significant dividends!
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13 Comments
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Anyone know a link to the complete Hannity video?
Good Job Greg. Iwonder whois responsible for this leap into new media?
Brian, the studio was quiet at that point and I may have a significant portion of it that I shot at extreme zoom with one of the cameras I was using. Probably not the greatest quality, but I’ll take a look.
YankeePhil, the RPV New Media Committee came up with this — Steve Albertson, Cort Pubrese and Tom Whitmore were the prime movers on this. There are a lot of other folks to thank as well, including the McDonnell campaign, Chairman Mullins, The House Republican Caucus and more. The list gets so large, you almost have to simply thank the Republican Party of Virginia as a whole.
As well as a big ol’ thank you to you, Greg. You did a fantastic job on Saturday. Truly yeoman’s work.
Kudos!
Did anyone record the feed that was going to the video projectors?
Thank you Greg! You did a great job on both Friday and Saturday.
Well, it seems this year’s convention, the end result of a year of re-forming the party apparatus by Jeff Frederick, was MUCH BETTER than the convention last year run by the old guard. Jeff may have been polarizing, but he promised to bring the party into the 21st century, and it sounds like that worked well.
Brian, I didn’t have a video matrix switcher to both take the feed from the cameras for recording as well as the video feed going out over ustream. About ten minutes before the convention on Saturday I got the word that we wouldn’t be doing a live “half-time” show and had to reconfigure all the A/V systems to run parallel production systems — one for the studio and one for ustream. We separated the video streams before the convention started, and finally managed to cobble together all the parts we needed to separate the audio streams about an hour or so into the convention with only a minor interruption in the audio for ustream.
The short answer is that no, I couldn’t capture the floor production feed. Too bad. There are lots of folks out there clamoring for bits and pieces of that, and in hindsight I wish I had pushed to make that happen. Oh, well. Lesson learned for next time. I’m still trying to see if the company that managed the big screens and floor production has something.
On the positive side, one of the very few speeches I was able to get was Sean Hannity’s speech. I was on extreme zoom (20x) with one of my cameras, and it was still a rather too-wide shot but the audio is good and the video has cutaways to audience reaction during the speech. We had some downtime with the studio when Sean was speaking, waiting for parts to separate the audio streams, so I took that opportunity to do what I could with the equipment at hand.
Wish I could have done more, but I spent way too much as it was putting together all the equipment we absolutely needed. I really could have used about $20K more of equipment, but I just wasn’t in a position to even go out and rent the full suite I wish I could have had at my disposal. We had some generous funding from the House Republican Caucus and put it to good use, but I suppose there’s always the idea that with more, you can do more.
The Hannity speech should be up sometime this evening.
Charles, you are more right than you probably realize. All this happened because Jeff Frederick got the ball rolling, and the New Media Committee members were dedicated enough to keep it going and demonstrate to the new leadership the original vision at work here.
Awesome job, Greg! Sorry I missed you there.
Rusty McGuire sent out an email today with the link to the interview. He and his campaign manager were blown away by the professional product. Rusty sends his thanks for a job well done, Greg!
I am looking forward to doing more of this type of thing and have offered Tom Whitmore a hand at the next event. You guys did a lot of hard work and I feel it is my duty to help out if I can.
Many thanks to all involved!
I was at that convention (great vibes all around) and the most inspiring speaker I heard was the young cadet commander from VA Tech, Adnan Barqawi, who came here from Kuwait to attend college.
WOW, what a speech and what a story!!! He has a message everyone needs to hear and he had us up on our feet through most of his speech. He reminds us of so many things we have forgotten about or taken for granted in this great country. What is really interesting is to hear his perspective on what it is to be a “new citizen” and how diversity really means “embracing your new culture, rather than expecting your new culture to embrace YOU”. “I have learned the meaning of individual respionsibility, that no one is in charge of my welfare except myself”. He was dynamic, to say the least.
His speech is on youtube in 2 parts, both of which I’ve included.
Take a few minutes, listen to him and (regardless of your party), be inspired by what he has to say.
Enjoy
Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4_0L2ZJAvQ&feature=related
Part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zejvNWt65VI&feature=related
You can’t help but run into Ben Tribbett. He’s really porked out! What happened, did he get into a Twinkie eating contest with Joey?