The challenge of coordinating a live event for subscribers in the room and those at home

My job isn’t particularly difficult when you’re relying on the experiences and anecdotes of Patrick Cockburn and Bel Trew as your content for the evening

“Remember, you need to make sure the people asking questions have a microphone.” I repeated that sentence upwards of 15 times while prepping our international editor, Olivia Alabaster, before she hosted our “Middle East in crisis” event on Tuesday night.

Since the launch of our new membership platform we’ve been putting on live debates for subscribers. It’s part of the package. Sign up to Independent Minds and you get a ton of exclusive content, a totally ad-free experience and also unlimited access to our journalists and experts in the form of these events.

It’s important that they’re a valuable experience to our loyal subscribers who can make the journey to such events – but we also livestream them. We were joined by 35,000 viewers as we broadcast across YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.