For any aspiring journalist, being able to tell an editor you have liveblogging experience is a definite bonus.

Tools such as Cover It Live mean even if you aren’t working for a media organization, you can practise from the comfort of your own home.

Just pick an event which allows for constant different updates (a conference, debate or for those with a political bent Prime Minister’s Question Time is perfect) and get going.

Practice allows you to get a feel for what makes a good live blog, which is usually a mixture of direct and reported speech, some colour commentary and the ability to use links and other content to put the event into a wider context.

For  expert tips on what makes a successful live blog, see Paul Bradshaw’s tips on what to report and Ed Walker’s thoughts on things to include in your coverage.

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Many of you will have used Coveritlive already for liveblogging, but 10,000 Words has a good how to post on using it to curate tweetstreams.

For those who haven’t tried this before the post has some good practical advice on using it to pull in tweets from individual users, lists, search terms and hashtags to curate streams.

See the full post on 10,000 Words at this link.

Tipster: Joel Gunter.

To submit a tip to Journalism.co.uk, use this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

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TechCrunch reports today that Demand Media has bought CoverItLive for an undisclosed sum. The liveblogging tool was founded in Toronto, Canada in 2007 with funding of $1 million.

Demand Media has originally made a strategic investment in CoverItLive back in 2009, acquiring a minority interest in the startup. With today’s acquisition, CoverItLive will become a platform within Demand Media’s portfolio of social “solutions”.

TechCrunch’s full post is at this link

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The World Editors Forum kicks off today. You can follow discussions on how newspapers are developing new editorial products, experimenting with new business models and what that means for the journalism they produce and the journalists they employ. The full line-up is available at this link.

Watch the livestream below courtesy of the European Journalism Centre (EJC) or follow the Twitter discussion with the hashtag #wefhamburg. Journalism.co.uk will also be tweeting from @journalism_live and our coverage can be found on the blog and main news site under the tag #wefhamburg.

You can also follow all the tweets from the event via Coveritlive below the livestream video

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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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What has the web ever done for journalism, except skewer its business model and return freelance rates to levels not seen since the early 90s?

Well, not much, apart from reinvent the form.

Amidst the doom of gloom in our industry it is easy to lose sight of how the web has transformed the way we tell stories, provide context and analysis, and cover live events.

This is arguably the most creative period in news journalism since movable type – new forms, new applications and new execution. Newspapers are embracing video and audio, radio stations do pictures, and TV has gone blogging.

You’re likely to have your own suggestions, and favourites. But here are five of the best:

1. Interactive infographics

Broadcast news was quick to adopt the graphic as a means of explaining complex issues or, more prosaically, make the most of a picture-challenged story. The web has taken the best examples from newspapers, magazines and TV and given them a twist – interactivity. Now you can interrogate the data, slice and dice it at will. Two of the best practitioners of the art can be found in the US – the New York Times and South Florida’s Sun Sentinel.

2. Crowdsourcing

From crime mapping to a pictorial memorial to the victims of post-election Iran to joint investigations, the crowd is proving a potent force in journalism. It took the web to provide the environment for a real-time collaboration and ad hoc groups are brought together by dint of interest, expertise, geography or some combination of all three. Not all crowdsourcing projects run smooth but the power of the crowd will continue to surprise.

3. The podcast

Just as cheap video cameras and YouTube democratised the moving image, so the podcast has made audio publishers of us all. Some podcasts mirror radio almost exactly in format, down to the commercial breaks at the top, middle and end of the show. Others break the rules. As Erik Qualman notes in his new book Socialnomics, today’s podcasters are taking liberties with advertising models (building in sponsorship) and with length of transmission (“If a podcast only has 16 minutes of news-worthy items, then why waste … time trying to fill the slot with sub-par content?”).

4. Over-by-over

A completely original approach to sports reporting, only possible on a real-time platform. Like Sky’s Soccer Saturday – where a bunch of ex-pros watch matches you can’t see and offer semi-coherent banter – over-by-over and ball-by-ball cricket and football commentaries shouldn’t work, but they do. And it’s not just the application, it’s the execution. The commentaries are knowing, not fawning, conversational and participatory. Over-by-over is CoveritLive and Twitter‘s (child-like) elder sibling.

5. The blog

The blog and the conventional news article are entirely separate forms, as any publisher who has tried to fob the user off by sticking the word ‘blog’ at the top of a standard story template will tell you. The blog allows you to tell stories in a different way, deconstructing the inverted pyramid and addressing the who, what, why, when, where and how as appropriate. Breaking news has become a narrative – early lines followed by more detail, reaction, photos, analysis, video, comment and fact checking in no defined order. It’s a collaborative work in progress. News is becoming atomised on the web and the blog is the platform on which it is happening.

I’ve named five but there are bound to be others. What have I missed?

Jon Bernstein is former multimedia editor of Channel 4 News. This is part of a series of regular columns for Journalism.co.uk. You can read his personal blog at jonbernstein.wordpress.com.

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Three thousand police officers hit the streets last Friday for Operation Admiral – a series of co-ordinated raids over a 24 hour period, aimed at hunting down Greater Manchester’s most violent drunken thugs.

During the operation 672 people were arrested and multiple weapons found including an AK-47 machine gun with a rocket launcher.

Manchester Evening News (MEN) reporter Dean Kirby was in the Greater Manchester Police (GMP) control room from 9am through till just after 5pm using Twitter to provide live updates to the MEN website, which were streamed via a CoveritLive blog.

Readers of Kirby’s coverage began leaving comments from as early as 11.35 am, one anonymously advising that ‘They need to concentrate more on Rochdale’.

Throughout the rest of the day sporadic messages of support filtered in from the public, one such said, ‘well done GMP keep up the good work’. In response assistant chief constable Garry Shewan thanked ‘the public for their strong support over the last 24 hours’.

The MEN’s online coverage provided a host of stories in the weekend’s print editions – broken down by the 12 divisions of the Greater Manchester Police – and several online follow-ups.

The MEN has previously made good use of data from news stories online – see its homicide map for the Manchester area – so figures from the raids could provide a starting point for new visualisations.

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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:

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Ed’s picks:

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Tip of the Day:

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#FollowJourn:

• @mathewi/communities editor

On the Editors’ Blog:

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Northcliffe has brought its standalone sport sites in the north east onto the same platform as its newspaper websites for Hull, Grimsby, Scunthorpe and Lincoln – as reported by HoldtheFrontPage – e.g. the sports section on each of the thisis sites for these areas now redirects to SportHull.co.uk, SportGrimsby.co.uk etc.

There’s a big push for interactivity with a Virgin Media video player of sporting highlights alongside in-house videos; CoveritLive blogs for match days and an aggregated feed of local sports news from a range of sources (see left).

Sports coverage is a huge traffic driver to regional newspaper websites and breeds interaction and buzz (one story on the SportHull page posted yesterday morning had already attracted 113 comments at time of writing this post).

The section is more differentiated from the rest of the site now in these four examples, so will it have an impact on traffic to other news areas that may have benefited from the traffic generated by the sports channel. While the sports sections do have a link back to the main website they are more heavily demarcated than previously.

With the new features these pages offer a one-stop shop for local sports fans – I can’t spot a link to a message board or forum on the new sports’ sites however. Other Northcliffe titles still use this format – are the new sites hoping the other interactive features will replace these?

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Journalism.co.uk will be reporting today’s culture, media and sport select committee meeting at this post, using CoverItLive. We’ll also send out occasional updates via our event Twitter account, @journalism_live.

Background: following reports by the Guardian newspaper that there were further allegations and evidence, previously unreported, indicating that News International journalists had repeated involvement in the use of criminal methods to get stories, the House of Commons culture select committee has begun taking new evidence. Last week it heard evidence from Nick Davies, the Guardian journalist who reported the allegations, Alan Rusbridger, editor in chief of Guardian News & Media and Tim Toulmin, director of the Press Complaints Commission.

• Previous Journalism.co.uk coverage can be found at this link.

Today the committee will hear evidence from Andy Coulson, former News of the World editor (and currently director of communications for the Conservative Party), and Stuart Kuttner, former NOTW managing editor.

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Embedding multimedia: If you want to embed multimedia content, for example a CoveritLive blog, but don’t have the code, try searching for it in the page source. On Firefox this is found on the menu bar under ‘View’. Tipster: Laura Oliver.

To submit a tip to Journalism.co.uk, use this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

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If you haven’t heard already (from the many tweets, blog posts etc) the president of liveblogging technology CoverItLive, Keith McSpurren, is going to be chatting with a small group of interested parties today at City University from 1pm.

Michael Haddon is getting into the spirit of things and will attempt to liveblog the proceedings:

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Journalism.co.uk is attending JEEcamp today – an ‘unconference’ (e.g. any attendees can suggest the topics for discussion) about future models for journalism, focusing on enterprise and experimentation.

“JEEcamp is an opportunity for a range of people to get together to talk about how on earth journalists and publishers can make a living from journalism in the era of free information, what the challenges are, and what we’ve learned so far.”

Organsied by Birmingham City University lecturer and Online Journalism Blog blogger Paul Bradshaw, the event is a sell out – but there are plenty of ways to follow what’s going on.

There’s a liveblog of the event here.

There will be lots of twittering (see the attendees list for a rough guide of who to follow and @journalism_live) under the #jeecamp hashtag. If you tag your tweets in this way they’ll be fed through to the CoverItLive bloggers too.

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• What happens when you find yourself as the only English-language television broadcaster at a breaking news scene?

• What happens when that breaking news scene is a major war in the middle east?

That’s exactly what happened for Al Jazeera journalists Sherine Tadros and Ayman Mohyeldin earlier this year when Al Jazeera English found itself the only major English television broadcaster allowed inside Gaza.

A 12-day ban prevented other Western media networks entering the area – although the BBC used two producers already on the ground. Read this post by the POLIS researcher Nina Bigalke, on Charlie Beckett’s blog, for a fuller context. “If 12 hours are a very long time in the world of journalism, 12 days seem like an eternity,” Bigalke writes.

Journalism.co.uk first met Tadros and Mohyeldin, who reported from Gaza throughout the conflict, in February:

“To be the only English channel on the ground could be a ‘one-off experience’ during her career, [Tadros] said. While she thrived on being part of the only English-language media team on the ground – ‘everything we did was exclusive’ – Tadros was aware of the responsibility to cover as much as possible for an English speaking audience.”

Now it’s your chance to join in and put your questions to the pair. Visit this site at 2pm (GMT +1). Journalism.co.uk will be putting a series of questions, via CoverItLive, to Tadros and Mohyeldin about their experience. Was it liberating to find themselves without the BBC working alongside? Was it a daunting responsibility?

Leave your own questions in the comments below this post and they will be included in the interview. See you at 2pm (4pm Doha time). You can also submit questions to @journalism_live on Twitter.

UPDATE 15.00 BST: THIS EVENT HAS NOW FINISHED. Thank you for your questions and thoughts. Please leave additional comments on the subject of media coverage in Gaza below this post. If you participated and wish to comment on the use of CoverItLive in this format please send your feedback to judith at journalism.co.uk. Did it seem a good way to present an interview? Was the balance of questions between Journalism.co.uk and users about right? Many thanks in advance for your help.

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