To mark President Elect Barack Obama’s inauguration on January 20, news sites are plotting and planning their online coverage already:

CNN

CNN’s going for the social networking angle, teaming its live video streaming site, CNN.com Live, with Facebook. Users will be able to update their Facebook status from the CNN site and see a stream of updates from their friends.

The updates entered via CNNLive will be tagged with the hyperlink ‘via CNN.com Live’ so Facebook contacts can click through to view the inauguration site from the social network.

NPR

At the end of last year, NPR used its inside blog to put a call out for social media ways to cover the inauguration. Among the ideas mooted in the post were:

• Citizen journalism iPhone app
• ‘Mobcasting’ – audio recordings of voicemails left by listeners about their experiences of inauguration day
• An inauguration #tag – for Twitter, Flickr, blog posts etc. The tag #inaug09 seems to be in use already.
• Maps of user-generated content

More help is wanted from techies and journalists – contact Andy Carvin (@acarvin on Twitter) via the blog post.