The challenge of coordinating a live event for subscribers in the room and those at home

“Remember, you need to make sure the people asking questions have a microphone.” I repeated that sentence upwards of 15 times while prepping our international editor, Olivia Alabaster, before she hosted our “Middle East in crisis” event on Tuesday night.

Since the launch of our new membership platform we’ve been putting on live debates for subscribers. It’s part of the package. Sign up to Independent Minds and you get a ton of exclusive content, a totally ad-free experience and also unlimited access to our journalists and experts in the form of these events.

It’s important that they’re a valuable experience to our loyal subscribers who can make the journey to such events – but we also livestream them. We were joined by 35,000 viewers as we broadcast across YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

My challenge: take an event designed to reward the loyalty of you, our subscribed members, which creates an intimate experience for the people in the room and make that work in the vast landscape that is social media.

Luckily for me, when you’re relying on the experiences and anecdotes of Patrick Cockburn and Bel Trew as your content for the evening, that isn’t particularly difficult. Drawing on years of work, Cockburn described how the Middle East has changed as a region during his time covering it. Trew, fresh off the back of her excellent series Water Wars, delivered a damning statement.

“We are the last generation that can fix climate change and we are going to see wars over water in the Middle East.”

When I am provided with a conversation that captivates people in the way it did on Tuesday night, it really isn’t so hard to make the experience for people watching online a positive one. All I asked from our host was... “Remember, you need to make sure the people asking questions have a microphone.”

If you didn’t catch the event live you can watch it back to your heart’s content – just click here.

Yours,

Tom Richell

Head of video