Interviews with Chris Elliot, political editor and reporter at the Cambridge Evening News.

As described by the depositor:

When we met Chris in the Boardroom of the CEN two days before the General Election he was getting his troops in order. He said: “For the first time ever we are not going to produce a newspaper on the morning after the Election because the results don’t come through until 4 or 5 O’clock. From a production point of view we are going to do it online.

“We are going to have Twitter, a live blog on our website, separate stories will be posted direct from the count via email and our laptops straight onto the CEN website. It is a revolution compared to previous elections. Social media is a lot more up and running now than it was in 2010.

“We have 9 counts and we are going to have reporters at five of them, picking up details from the other four. They will be emailing their material to another member of staff who will be at home, not even in the office, who will feed them into a live blog. Twitter is the fastest way to get the results out there, it will be on our individual Twitter accounts and then onto our website.

“We now have a 30 or 40 thousand readership and on a daily basis we get 50 to 60 thousands hits on our website. It is a big change from the days when I started in journalism 30 years ago when we would sell 60 or 70 thousand papers a night, the website isn’t up to that speed yet but it is getting there.

“My first General Election was in 1979, when Thatcher came to power, we then had three terms of Tony Blair, then John Major, and I have covered all of these things through the prism of Cambridge.

“In the office we are monitoring Twitter all the time in case something pops up that is of interest to us. The national papers can be political and support a particular party but we have to be factual. We have ensured that all the parties have had a fair say and we are pleased about that and now we have to wait and see what happens on Thursday. “