Community media is perhaps at its best when it’s able to educate voters through the use of local candidate forums. In anticipation of February primaries, several centers are producing forums to allow voters to make more educated decisions at the polls.

Staff from Oshkosh Media worked with the League of Women Voters of Winnebago County to produce a candidates forum for Winnebago County Circuit Court Branch 1 Judge on Wednesday, January 31. The forum appeared live on Oshkosh Media Gov TV and can now be seen on-demand here. Voters will see the three candidates for Winnebago County Circuit Court Branch 1 on their primary ballot on February 20. The top two vote getters will appear on the ballot for the April election.

On January 31, Marshfield Broadcasting presented a live forum among the seven candidates running for the Marshfield Unified School District School Board. The forum can be watched here. All seven candidates will be on the ballot on February 20 with six moving on to the general election in April.

Marshfield Broadcasting also fills the gap in local election coverage with “Get to Know Your Candidate” with studio program host Tom Loucks and producer David Ballerstein. Loucks interviewed seven Marshfield School Board candidates eyeing for three seats on the board for the upcoming February 20 primary. Each 28-minute program was shared on multiple platforms and is getting a lot of engagement from the locals of Marshfield. You can find them here.

The station is building viewers at a rapid pace because local media is silent and without community television coverage the public would be in the dark when going to the polls, said Loucks.

After the primary election, Marshfield Broadcasting will turn its sights on local City Council election coverage giving the same opportunities to those candidates.

Also, the Sun Prairie Media Center hosted a forum between the three candidates running for the city council seat being vacated by Brent Eisberner. The candidates are Bill Baker, Matthew Hill, and Santiago Rosas. The two candidates with the most votes will move on from the February 20 primary to the April 2 spring election. That forum can be watched here.

If you know of any locally-produced candidate forums not mentioned here, please let us know and we’ll highlight them next month.

For more information on any and all upcoming elections in the state, voters can go to www.MyVote.wi.gov.