Sedona voters have had numerous opportunities to get to know City Council candidates via public forums, speaking engagements and gatherings.

Yet at such events, both candidates for City Council and the mayor’s seat had their political game faces on, speaking to voters about narrowly tailored topics at forums or when speaking to overt political crowds at public events.

This week we are unveiling our one-on-one interview podcast “After Press” with the runoff candidates for Sedona mayor: Samaire Armstrong and Scott Jablow.

Both candidates met with our reporter Carol Kahn, best known in our newspaper for her long-form feature stories on artists and local leaders. Kahn has years of experience interviewing artists, filmmakers, actors, directors and celebrities. Last week, she turned those skills toward interviewing that candidates who want to lead our city for the next two years.

Kahn sat with Jablow and Armstrong, interviewing each for an hour about their personal lives, their worldviews their political views their goals for Sedona, why they’re running and what they hope to accomplish if elected to council as your next mayor.

With Kahn in front of the lenses, Larson Newspapers photojournalists Daulton Venglar and David Jolkovski behind the cameras and General Manager Kyle Larson editing the videos and mixing the sound, we have produced a pair of high-quality interview “After Press” podcasts, now available on our website redrocknews.com and our YouTube channel.

We hope that you will spend an hour each with the candidates, get to know them on a personal level and walk away with a better understanding about the two who has chosen to campaign for your vote on Tuesday, Nov. 8, or on your early ballots, due to be sent on Wednesday, Oct. 12.

If the podcasts influence who you vote for, great. If they just get you to know who our candidates are as people and doesn’t change your vote at all, then the videos are still a success.

All too often in the political sphere we see votes by legislative officials and their public statements as the sole raison d’être of a political figure without understanding the underlying motivations, expectations, aspirations and inspirations that push them toward a life of public service.

The folks who run for mayor are doing it out of service to us. There’s a miniscule salary that basically covers travel expenses so these two aren’t doing it for the money, they get all of the blame and little of the credit for what happens, so it’s not easy job [as a newspaper editor, I can relate]. They will be merely one voice in a choir and who must strive for consensus among seven people of varying views. We should honor that effort with a mere two hours of our time. The interviews are independent of each other and follow different paths of conversation so it doesn’t really matter which one you watch first.

If the video podcast isn’t your speed or you’re too busy, you can instead listen to just the audio of our two “After Press” podcasts on Spotify or your favorite podcast app.

You can access both at linktr.ee/afterpress.

Please feel free to share the links of these videos with friends and family who have decided or not about who to vote for in the runoff election.

These interviews serve as a gentle precursor to our Thursday, Oct. 6, mayoral debate held at the Mary D. Fisher and Alice Gill-Sheldon theaters under the auspices of the Sedona International Film Festival

We’re hoping that the video and sound quality is equally on par for that debate as it was for these intimate looks at our candidates.

For those unable to get tickets we will be broadcasting the debate live on Facebook and posting it later to our YouTube page.

I and my fellow moderator will have probing and contemplative questions to ask the candidates, touching on policy and political issues affecting you, your families, and the city as a whole.

We hope you will join us either in person or online and enjoy bringing this event to you. We plan for more “After Press” podcasts once the election is over to give viewers insight into the news affecting our community that can’t be contained on mere newsprint. As the news evolves, so will we with how we present it to you.

Christopher Fox Graham

Managing Editor