Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog » CoveritLive

#soe09: Live coverage online – opportunities for audience and money?

Laura Oliver — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:35:17 +0000

The benefits of using social media sites, predominantly Twitter, to cover live news events, newsgather and let the readers in were stressed by speakers from Sky News, Trinity Mirror, NWN Media and Northcliffe in a session at the Society of Editors conference today.

Sky’s social media correspondent (once titled ‘Twitter correspondent’) Ruth Barnett explained what had been learned since her role was created:

“We’d be very foolish as journalists not to be part of this interaction (…) I use it as a newswire – not one as valuable verifiable and reliable as PA, but as a good source of leads, eye witnesses and trends.

“If we can tweet our own breaking news it allows us to be proud of it, own it and direct traffic back to us.”

But there’s more to come: Trinity Mirror multimedia head David Higgerson emphasised the need to work with the audience to improve the use of tools such as CoveritLive.

“The big lesson that we need to learn is that we need to involve the audience more. If people want more passive coverage we’ve got the BBC, which is not to be critical of the BBC, but it can be hard to interact with it,” said Higgerson.

There needs to be experiments with livestreaming video into liveblogs, he added, and newspapers should start looking at the potential of tools like Audioboo. There’s no reason Audioboo, for example, couldn’t be used for more in-depth reporting, such as livecasting election results, he explained.

But the biggest challenge is finding a way to work with the ‘army of citizen journalists’:

“We need to go to them and our reporters need to be building relationships with them. If we can engage with them on local terms we can create a potent force for live news.”

But it was Hull Daily Mail editor John Meehan who suggested that liveblogging and live-tweeting could be a revenue opportunity for news groups:

“If paid content on the web is part of our salvation we have an obligation to develop services that go far beyond news and traditional reporting (…) It used to be paid-for live coverage in print (…) Covering it live on the web, real-time and interactive, may be one of the keys to earning revenue from content published online,” said Meehan, who used the Mail’s coverage of transfer deadline day in September as an example (500 posts on CoveritLive by journalists; 6,200 comments received on all-day liveblog).

“We’ve got no plans to make them pay for it, but I think we as an industry should have an eye on where we can make money from. If that many people are going to spend that much time on a service, they really value that service (…) Mainstream news is a commodity; we need to find the things that aren’t commoditised.”

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Journalism Daily: 3am.co.uk launch, MSNBC and EveryBlock, Bauer Radio’s new deal

Judith Townend — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 16:06:05 +0000

A daily round-up of all the content published on the Journalism.co.uk site. Additionally, you can sign up to our e-newsletter and subscribe to the feed for the Journalism Daily here.

News and features:

Ed’s picks:

Tip of the Day:

Freelance job listings

#FollowJourn:

@mathewi/communities editor

On the Editors’ Blog:

Former Total Politics editor to start up PR company

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Birmingham Post: George Osborne to brave CoverItLive

Judith Townend — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 10:22:20 +0000

From 10.40 am today (Friday) the shadow chancellor will be taking live questions from BirminghamPost.net users.

“We think it might be the most senior politician to use the Cover It Live software…” Birmingham Post editor Marc Reeves told Journalism.co.uk.

The CoverItLive page can be found at this link and it’s open for questions now.

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CoverItLive – follow #cfund debate on online news business models

admin — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 15:43:24 +0000

DEBATE: CROWDFUNDIG

Veja Agora!

(And yes we know it should be ‘crowdfunding’, but that’s not the debate!)

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Times Online inauguration live blog attracts 35,000

Laura Oliver — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 15:43:18 +0000

Among the inauguration day records for media sites, nice to hear of success for Times Online’s own interactive coverage – a liveblog using CoveritLive.

Run for eight-and-a-half hours and hosted on the Times’ Comment Central blog, the liveblog attracted 35,000 visitors and 50 comments a minute at its peak, according to a tweet from Tom Whitwell, assistant editor of Times Online.

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TheNextWeb: CoverItLive launches search feature

Judith Townend — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 12:09:12 +0000

The CoveritLive team has decided to launch a search feature - 'as they now have enough content to make such a technology relevant.' But, asks Ernst-Jan Pfauth, how best to use it?

Liverpool Daily Post runs four-day liveblog

Laura Oliver — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 12:47:14 +0000

The Liverpool Daily Post is embarking on a four day liveblog to cover the visit of the Tall Ship to the Mersey using CoveritLive.

Following previous Post experiments with the liveblogging tool, the blog will feature text, images and videos from the event sent by the reporting team.

The paper is also asking readers to submit comments and images by text, and participate in the blog online.

Coverage has started today and will continue till Monday evening.

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Sky News uses CoveritLive for Crewe by-election debate

Laura Oliver — Tue, 20 May 2008 13:05:29 +0000

Sky News yesterday used live blogging service CoveritLive to host a debate between candidates standing in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election (thanks to Simon Dickson and his Puffbox blog for the tip).

Candidates Tamsin Dunwoody (Labour), Elizabeth Shenton (Lib Dem) and Edward Timpson (Conservatives) responded to questions directly from readers of the blog and Sky News’ host Martin Stanford.

The service is becoming increasingly popular with news sites: today the Lancashire Evening Post is liveblogging an afternoon from a local pub, while US newspaper the Grand Island Independent used the tool as a feedback channel during the redesign of its website.

Elsewhere Farmers’ Weekly is liveblogging ‘an afternoon in the life of the newsroom’ – a similar experiment to that conducted by the Liverpool Daily Post.

Read Journalism.co.uk’s interview with CoveritLive president Keith McSpurren.

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Mashable: CoverItLive to integrate Twitter

Laura Oliver — Thu, 01 May 2008 12:24:26 +0000

Live blogging service CoverItLive is planning some handy updates including possible integration with fellow online tool Twitter.

Details are uncertain at the moment, but Keith McSpurren, president of CoverItLive, says an iPhone version is also in the pipeline.

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Innovations in Journalism – CoveritLive ‘Humbly, we are forging a new form of journalism’

Oliver Luft — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 10:47:43 +0000

We give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on. Today it’s live blogging with difference, with an interactive community, through CoveritLive.

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
I’m Keith McSpurren, president of CoveritLive, which is what we call ‘live blogging 2.0’. It evolves live blogging from an interesting recap into an engaging event.

We have added interactivity features to live blogging, like polling questions and reader Q&A to involve the audience more.

We also made it simple for journalists to pull in rich multimedia (video, pictures, audio and even advertising) to create an event worth sticking around for.

Humbly, we think we are forging a new form of journalism.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
People look to journalists for information and perspective. We believe there are many instances where getting that as events unfold is better than after the event is over.

Instead of reading an article about The Oscars or a Q&A session in Parliament for a few minutes the next day, why not get running commentary in real time from your favourite writers?

Why not have the chance for readers to ask questions or add to the conversation or answer polling questions as well as draw upon the multimedia readily available on the web during the event?

These are all good ideas but the real benefit of CoveritLive to the journalist is that we believe we have made it possible to do all of this without the need for the IT department or any technical training.

The ease of implementation and use is really what gets writers excited when they first try it out.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
CoveritLive is the first piece of software in the world to focus on live blogging. This is an evolving form of journalism and we listen very carefully to our users to develop better features all the time.

For example, next week we will launch a feature we call ‘Panel Discussion’ which will allow writers to have up to ten other writers all in the same live blog. Great for Q&A sessions, particularly with people who are spread out around the world.

Imagine the foreign correspondent in Baghdad online with the political reporter and two guests…without needing anyone to ‘set it up’ for them.

Cobbling together other expensive technology can do this kind of thing but by making it easy to do, we expect these kinds of features to grow the field of live blog reporting.

In the same way cheap, easy to use blogging software created a new form of reporting, we hope to do this where ‘live and in-depth’ is important.

4) Why are you doing this?
CiL is a commercial venture so we most definitely have a profit motive. That said the idea came around because I felt (after watching far too much television and yelling at it) that “there is more to be said”.

We think, with the right software, journalists can make their coverage better or add to what I’m watching on television. Politics, sports, financial news, conferences and even education are all areas where easy to use, low cost software can help the people who cover it.

5) What does it cost to use it?
The software is free to use. This sometimes has an unintended impact where larger news organisations think, “It’s free. It must not be very good or be able to handle someone big like us.”

That could not be farther from the truth. It’s free because we are trying to lead the way with our users towards a new form of reporting. Putting price as a barrier to trial is not a good idea.

6) How will you make it pay?
We think our software creates significant opportunities for our users in terms of engaging their readers for long periods of time during a live blog.

Some recent data from an NFL football blog using CoveritLive demonstrates my point:

Unique viewers: 2750
Average duration on the live blog: 62 minutes
Percentage of readers 30 minutes or more: 51% (or over 1300 readers)
Number of Instant Replays clicked to view after the live blog: 4700

These kind of numbers create huge advertising opportunities for users interested in that type of thing.

We expect that value is worth paying for at some point once we have proven to be the software of choice in this new category.

Additionally, advertising supported software is a proven business model that will be more appropriate for micro-niche bloggers/writers who get the benefit of enterprise class software at no cost.

All this said, we are focused solely on being responsive to our users and growing usage. Revenue will follow good ideas.

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