The Meet the Candidates feature for the 2018 Cherry Hill Board of Education Election was the fifth-most read Cherry Hill Sun story of the year.
Editor’s Note: This is part of a countdown of the top 10 most read stories on www.cherryhillsun.com in 2018. This story was the fifth most read.
Meet the Candidates has been an election staple for all of The Sun Newspapers for more than a decade now. However, this year the series was revamped, with the biggest change seeing The Cherry Hill Sun host a Meet the Candidates series for the Board of Education election for the first time ever.
The response to the series was overwhelming. The number of people who read the Board of Education Meet the Candidates series easily topped the previous three Meet the Candidates series for Cherry Hill Township Council and would go on to be the №5 most read Cherry Hill Sun story of 2018.
This year’s Meet the Candidates series was formatted differently than in past years. All 11 BOE candidates were asked to fill out a form with biographical information such as their profession and clubs or organizations there were involved in. After this, each candidates was given the opportunity to talk about why they were running for Cherry Hill Board of Education. In the past, candidates were asked to answer a series of questions across four weeks leading up to the election.
All 11 candidates in the election chose to participate in this series. It ran online a little less than one more before the election, on Oct. 11. The amount of readership and social media engagement the series received served as a look into how invested the community was in this election. In the end, the Accountability, Collaboration, Transparency (ACT) team of Laurie Neary, David Rossi and Sally Tong would end up winning the election.
In the past, the top 10 stories of the year in the Cherry Hill Sun has typically been composed of mostly feature stories, with one or two articles about school news and one or two articles about township news rounding out the list. This year, the top 10 included only five feature stories and had five school stories, with no local township stories cracking the top 10. In addition, three of the five school stories in the top 10 were connected with the Cherry Hill BOE election.
To read the full Cherry Hill Board of Education Meet the Candidates story, visit https://cherryhillsun.com/meet-the-candidates-in-the-2018-cherry-hill-board-of-education-election-f50ddca77276
