Well, the election was pretty interesting! Tuesday was especially busy here at the Rogers compound. Dennis and I had decided to do some complete election coverage, something that is new to KICY. We don’t really focus that much on news, and to do something like this is really out of the ordinary. Tuesday around 10:30 Neil and I went to Nome-Beltz high school and interviewed kids about the election. They were all participating in a mock-election. As you may or may not know, in Alaska there was an initiative to legalize pot. We had one high-schooler that did a “report” on the initiative, and spent five minutes telling us why it would be good for the local economy. We interviewed some more kids in the cafeteria, then went down to “election headquarters” and interviewed the political science teacher who was heading up the whole project. Before we left, we also got to interview the principal. On our way home, we swung by city hall. Neil had to vote, and I thought it would be interesting to try my hand at some exit polls. It didn’t work. It only took two people turning me down, and the lack of gloves to convince me that waiting for Neil in the car would be a better idea.
We went back to the station and plugged in the mini-disc recorder, and started transferring the audio onto the computer. As that was running we went back out into town, this time with our remote broadcasting unit. I wanted to check the signal strength from the multiple places we were planning on broadcasting from that evening. First stop was the state building, and the regional elections office. Next was the headquarters for Donny Olsen, the local state senator who was running for re-election (he is a supporter of the station, and is the man who flew us out to our staff retreat a few weeks ago). He was all setup in the “ballroom” of the nice new hotel in town. After getting the information we needed, it was back to the station.
Back at the station we edited the interview audio, put a TV in the studio, and got ready for the evening. I made up a little promo letting people know that we would have coverage! We started our broadcast at 7:00pm, Neil and Lon were running the ship back at the station while Dennis and I took it on the road. Dennis went to Donny’s HQ, and I went to the state building. I got there around 7:45, but was way to early…so I sat in the truck for a while.
KNOM was there, and it was very fun to meet their news director, and see how serious they took all the village totals as they came in. I didn’t quite go as in depth as they did, reading the totals on the air. Village voting precincts reported back into Nome, and as they came in we were given the totals. They were pretty detailed, and it wasn’t uncommon to see something like: “For Diomede, Bush/Cheney: 34, Kerry/Edwards: 21. Tony Knowles: 54, Lisa Murkowski: 3″. Very small totals. Meanwhile back in the real world…Dan Rather was giving totals in the hundreds of millions, it was pretty funny. I left the state building at 11pm, when we started the Russian broadcasting.
