March 28, 2024
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WRNR & Eye On Annapolis To Sponsor Mayoral Debate

WRNR Radio and Eye On Annapolis will be sponsoring a debate for the two Mayoral hopefuls in the Annapolis election.

On Tuesday, October 8th at 7pm, Annapolis Mayor, Democrat  Josh Cohen and Republican challenger Mike Pantelides will square off on Twitter to talk about the issues that are important to you.

While Texas’ Senator Ted Cruz might be able to pontificate for 21 hours on the Senate floor, we will hold our candidates to a slightly lower benchmarks—140 characters.

Debate banner

How It Will Work

On October 8th, candidates, their staff, WRNR, and Eye On Annapolis will meet at a location to be determined and get the search criteria set up on the various laptops, tablets, and phones.  At 7pm, we will begin.

You can submit your questions to the candidates on Twitter from now until the debate ends.  Simply append your tweet with #ANP13 and WRNR and Eye On Annapolis will curate the questions and present them to the candidates during the debate. Questions submitted in advance will be presented during the first half and the candidates will field live questions during the second half.

We will cut the candidates some slack and allow them to utilize 2 tweets to respond if needed, but no more. While there are some City issues that are complex, this debate will boil the issues down to solid, short, responses. The candidates will need to be prepared and will need to be able to think on their feet to offer a succinct response.

The “transcript” of the debate will be available on Twitter simply by searching for the hashtag #ANP13. Additionally, we will be making a video of the debate available for viewing later.

How To Participate

#ANP13

You do not need a Twitter account to follow the debate. However, to submit a question or to receive an answer, you will need to sign up for the free service. You can do that at http://www.twitter.com.  Also, the night of the debate, we will have a dynamic feed on Eye On Annapolis in the upper right corner.

On the night of the debate, create a search for #ANP13 and follow along. If you are confused, just click on any #ANP13 link here and we have created the search for you! You can follow along or create your own tweet right here!

If you want to submit a question, sign up for Twitter and create your message (remember 140 characters) and append it with #ANP13.  Not all questions will be answered.

Why The Hashtag?

Hashtags in Twitter are a means of tracking a conversation and searching for the content you seek. The City elections have been carrying the #ANPElection13 hashtag and will continue to do so. We developed the #ANP13 hashtag to filter responses specific to this debate–the other one will still be used to follow the election. Additionally, with politicians normally being long winded, the shortened hashtag gives them 8 more valuable characters for their response.

Why Twitter?

Twitter was chosen as a platform for many reasons. First of all, it is easily archived and it forces the candidates to respond to questions in writing. Secondly, by holding the debate online, we are able to open it up to a far larger audience than an in-person debate. Twitter will allow interested voters the ability to review the debate at their leisure, on their own schedule. Twitter is a public platform and can be accessed by anyone and everyone with Internet access. And finally, the limited response provided by Twitter will force our candidates to really consider their responses.

 

 

 

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