Watch back at how the Kent Messenger Group and KMTV produced 12 hours of uninterrupted coverage of the 2024 General Election. Watch the full documentary on KMTV, Wednesday 23rd October at 5:45pm.
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00:00So as journalists, we get extremely excited about general elections.
00:04The way I describe it to most people, it's like the World Cup or the Euros for journalists.
00:09And Kent's very much on the front line of lots of political things in our country.
00:13Certainly as we emerged from COVID, a brief sense that maybe things would get better
00:18and then the dawning reality that they weren't, that had become really the defining story in Kent.
00:24We'd had an idea that we were going to do a programme.
00:28All the reporters were assigned different counts.
00:30So we were at every count in Kent, 18 of them.
00:32So we had more than 50 journalists.
00:3412 hours of coverage.
00:35And probably if we're completely honest,
00:37we weren't as far along in that planning as we needed to be
00:39at the point when Rishi Sunak said, it's happening, it's six weeks away.
00:43Quite lucky in that Kent became such a heated point for the election.
00:48To be able to be up there with the likes of the big broadcasters.
00:53It's exciting, isn't it? Exciting.
00:55So excited.
00:57I actually really am.
00:58We did things on the night which will stay with me forever, I think.
01:02Yeah, some results were a bit ropey with the feeds dropping out and things like that.
01:08It was, yeah, it was stressful.
01:09I didn't manage to go live.
01:11It was a lot of, a lot of caffeine to stay awake.
01:15And you spoke about change there, Lauren.
01:16Sorry, Cameron from KMTV.
01:18There is something to say for journalism still at a local level
01:24and covering the general election in a hyper-local way.
01:30I think it builds a level of trust that you wouldn't get anywhere else.