Live from Literati: Mayoral Candidate Debate

A debate for Ann Arbor’s four Democratic Party mayoral primary candidates is being hosted tonight, June 25, at 7:30 p.m. by Literati Bookstore. [.mp3 of audio from the event]

Photoshopped “art” of the chalkboard at Literati Bookstore at the southwest corner of Washington and Fourth in downtown Ann Arbor.

Literati is located at the southwest corner of Washington and Fourth in downtown Ann Arbor.

All four mayoral candidates currently serve on the Ann Arbor city council: Sabra Briere (Ward 1), Sally Petersen (Ward 2), Stephen Kunselman (Ward 3) and Christopher Taylor (Ward 3).

It’s likely that the winner of the Democratic primary on Aug. 5 will also win the general election in November. No Republican candidate took out nominating petitions this year. One independent candidate – Bryan Kelly – has taken out petitions for mayor, but not yet submitted them to the city clerk’s office.

Ann Arbor’s mayorship is an open race with no incumbent this year, because current mayor John Hieftje announced last year that he would not be seeking re-election to an eighth term. Terms for the mayor of Ann Arbor, like those of city councilmembers, last for two years.

The Chronicle is planning to broadcast live audio from the event (see below) and – if events unfold favorably – provide live text corresponding to that audio (see further below).

The event is described by Literati co-owners Hilary and Michael Gustafson on their bookstore’s website as follows: “As a new downtown business, we here at Literati are part of a growing and changing Ann Arbor landscape. But one thing that doesn’t change is our community. We’re proud to not only serve our community as a general bookseller, but to act as a space where our community can come together.”

The event will focus on downtown issues. It will be moderated by the Gustafsons.

The Chronicle’s live audio broadcast is planned to start around 7:20 p.m. to allow for sorting through technical issues that might arise.

Audio Player: Listen live using the Mixlr player embedded below. After the event, we will make available an .mp3 recording of the broadcast.

Text Box One: Live text from the event will be streamed into the top text box. The box is programmed to automatically force the view to the bottom-most (most recent) text – which facilitates hands-free reading.  The technique The Chronicle is testing out for this event is “voice-writing” – verbatim repetition by a human operator into a microphone that is connected to voice-recognition software. Note that this material will be uncorrected and could be fairly raw. An ellipsis “…” will be used to indicate missed text.

A corrected version of the text may be available at some point after the event.

Text Box Two: The contents of the bottom text box are identical to the contents of the top text box. What is different is that there’s no forced scroll to the bottom. So readers who are curious about topics covered earlier can scroll up to review.

If your text boxes display an error message that reads, “We’re trying to connect to the server,” we apologize. We’re not sure what causes that for some browser/hardware combinations.

[.mp3 recording of Literati mayoral debate]

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