Video adds new dimension to election coverage

Tuesday is Election Day.

For people in Washington County and around the nation that means taking all the information they have about candidates and issues, going to the polls, and casting a vote for what they feel is the best choice.

Some people sadly make uninformed choices, picking candidates simply because they have heard the name.

Around 1,000 voters took advantage of a special election section that we put online this year; the section offered a wealth of information about the races, including links to questioners, stories and editorials.

For the first time, our online section also offered videos of candidates in the Marietta School Board and the Marietta City Council. Marietta College students shot videos of the candidates while the Marietta Times Editorial Board was interviewing them. The video was then placed on YouTube and embedded onto pages on MariettaTimes.com. Readers could access the pages from our election page and hear the candidates explain, in their own words, why they be elected to office. The videos were viewed as many as 140 times each.

Improvements in technology has made adding video a fairly easy thing to do on the web, making it another method that we can use to tell a story and hopefully, in this case, help to make everyone a more informed voter.