By Larry Felton Johnson

The Cobb County Courier will live-stream the public comments at the Cobb school board work session and the regular meeting.

As Editor and Publisher of the Courier, I’m even considering a slogan for this project: “Come to the Cobb County Courier to hear what the Cobb County School District doesn’t want you to know!”

In a partisan vote at last month’s meeting, the majority of the school board voted to exclude public comments in the official live-stream of the meetings, so we are jumping in to fill the gap.

Frankly, since I’ll be doing the live-stream myself, my greatest fear is technical problems. I’ve upgraded to a smartphone with good video capabilities, bought a good set of external mics, and got a passable full-height tripod so the visuals can be steady. I also have a pretty decent external battery in case the livestream taxes the capacity of the phone battery.

One thing I haven’t figured out is how to zoom in and out while livestreaming, and I’m unsure if it’s even possible. So until I figure that out, you might be looking at tiny faces on the live stream. In the future, I might just use the video features on the phone itself to record, where I have full use of the camera controls, then immediately post to Facebook and YouTube after the public comments are over.

I’ve run several live-stream tests, and so far, everything seems to work.

We’ll be streaming to the Courier’s Facebook page and YouTube channel. I’m working on getting the stream to Instagram Live, but there are technical steps to stream to Instagram via third-party services that I haven’t gone through yet (I use Streamyard to stream to multiple platforms at once).

One thing to make clear is that every member of the public in Georgia has the right to record public meetings under Georgia’s strong Open Meetings Act.

Another thing I’d like to make clear is that if there are technical glitches, I’ll continue to work on them until we have a live stream that’s reliable, clear, and informative. So keep coming back, as I intend to make this a monthly thing.