The benefits of a live-blog: news, discussion and “crowd-sourcing”
Like a lot of newspapers and media outlets, the paper I work for in Canada — the Globe and Mail — has been experimenting a lot with a great live-blogging and live-discussion tool called Cover It Live. The software comes from a company located in Toronto, but is being used by everyone from Newsweek and Yahoo to Vanity Fair and the Austin Statesman-Review. We’ve hosted live discussion/news stories involving the Obama inauguration, the NHL hockey trade deadline, federal communication hearings and even a shooting in a Toronto subway station.
One of the big benefits of the software is that it allows you to do so much within the app itself, which is embedded in a story page as a widget via javascript. You can post photos right in the stream, embed video clips and do instant polls — and integrated into all that are comments from readers. You can also pull comments from Twitter, either by approving individual users or by pulling in tweets that use a specific hashtag or keyword related to the topic. The editor or “producer” can see all the comments and moderate them, and the live blog can be archived and replayed.
For large public events such as the Obama inauguration (or the Oscars), there is a very powerful desire to interact with other people who are watching the same event, and Cover It Live makes that very easy and appealing. News updates are interspersed with user comments in a very natural way, and reporters and editors can respond easily. For events such as the NHL trade deadline, several readers asked specific questions of the reporters and columnists who took part, and got answers within minutes — something that simply doesn’t happen with traditional newspaper stories, even online.
Our latest live-blog took place on Tuesday and Wednesday and was designed not so much for discussion, but simply as a place for us to put all of the breaking news that was coming in about swine flu, almost like a news-wire feed. But what happened was quite amazing: it became a discussion about the flu, and not just about whether it was appropriate to be afraid or not, but about its effect on people’s lives (wedding trips cancelled, etc.). Questions were asked about the flu and then answered almost as quickly, and knowledgeably — in many cases, before we could find the answers ourselves. And all through the live-blog, readers thanked us for doing it.
But my favourite part came a couple of hours into the blog, when someone commented that they didn’t think much of the swine flu map we were linking to in our news story, which was this map — a mashup created by infectious disease expert Henry Niman. So the editor moderating the blog asked if anyone knew of a better one. Within a minute or two, someone had posted a link to this map, which after a little bit of investigation turned out to be substantially better — with more recent updates, links to sources of the info, etc. And in a nice bit of symmetry, that map was also “crowd-sourced,” in that it was composed of data from multiple contributors.
So here we had a great news-driven package with photos and video (of news conferences), which got more than 5,000 unique readers in about five hours — and then on top of that we got hundreds of comments from readers, both asking questions and answering each other’s questions, and contributing links of value to both our readers and to us. And then to top it all off, several readers thanked us for doing it. How much better could it get?
Great article, Matthew, thanks. Just goes to show that good journalism is still all about good gatekeepers pushing the right buttons to direct the conversation and ensure the quality of the information.
I love Coveritlive. I used it for the first time today for a swine flu chat at http://www.chitowndailynews.org. Very cool stuff, easy to use and interactive.
It’s the first time I commented here and I must say you share us genuine, and quality information for bloggers! Good job.
p.s. You have a very good template for your blog. Where did you find it?
Agree to agree. Crowd sourcing is definitely the wave of the present in journalism. Though it’s not w/o its flaws, it represents the flattening we’ve seen in communication & access to both providing/obtaining information. Major news corps are using citizen journalism in ways we’ve never seen before in order to “be” on the front lines before they can actually BE on the front lines. To me, it’s pretty freaking cool that Anderson Cooper is Re-tweeting news from a previously no-name follower in Mumbai. I think that’s journalism at its best. Timely. Concise. Relevant. Real. The caution is that quality is hard to control as the flurry of tweets comes forth at rapid speed, but it’s here and its happening and people like it–they want more of it because they want to be there on some level. And I think that’s what has changed. We no longer want to simply know the news, we want to experience it & be a part of it.
Bethany Waggoner (@lilgirlbigvoice)
Great article.
I started using coveritlive about two months ago at town meetings. The board of selectmen got excited when a resident asked them a question through my live event. They said they felt the citizens are more engaged.
I’m waiting for the next big court case to blog live. We will be using coveritlive for election coverage in Holyoke, Mass., in Nov. 2010.
Combined with wordpress, this is a great tool. It cuts my writing time in half for the next day deadline on the actual story. The other reporters, still with notebooks, still scratch their heads and think I’m crazy.
Oh well, welcome to the 21st century.
I absolutely adore Cover It Live, and I’ve used it to liveblog (not surprisingly) events where journalists have spoken about the transformation from traditional media to new media. The most recent one was the Cossette Convergence panel ‘Journalist 2.0′.
Amen to what Bethany said: “We no longer want to simply know the news, we want to experience it & be a part of it.”
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