Tag Archives: America

Multimedia collaborations provide Super Tuesday coverage online

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Yesterday was just plain pancake day in the UK, but over the water it was Super Tuesday, as 24 of America’s 50 states voted on which candidates should be put forward for the country’s presidential election in November.

The coverage of the day’s events online saw some innovative multimedia and collaborative efforts from new and existing media outlets:

Mapping

Results + different time zones + different states = a great opportunity for breaking news displayed on mashed-up maps.

Google got in on the action with a map displaying live results and, with the help of Twitter and Twittervision, ‘tweets’ from across the US to give instant reactions from voters.

In another partnership with YouTube, as part of the site’s You Choose ’08 channel, Google is aggregating videos and clips from news organisations, candidates and users about Super Tuesday and plotting them on a Google map.

Elsewhere the BBC’s results map, which features as part of a broader election section, gives an easily navigable, state-by-state guide to the figures.

New collaboration

Publish2 launched a bookmarking system for newsrooms, bloggers and journalists, to create an aggregation service. Interested parties were asked to register for a free account and create a specific tag they would use – these tagged items can then be turned into a news feed by Publish2 to be repurposed on the tagger’s site.

Here’s an overview of the Networked Newsrooms idea or, to see it in action, visit the Knoxville News Sentinel or the New Jersey News Herald.

Video

Newsweek and The Washington Post teamed up for a five hour live webcast, encouraging viewers to react in a live webchat. Meanwhile The Huffington Post produced handheld footage from a Barack Obama rally in New York in the build-up to Tuesday and a live blog of the actual event.

MTV sent 23 of its ‘street team’ of citizen journalists to cover the polls and upload footage from video cameras and mobile phones. The clips are being distributed through MTV Mobile, Think.MTV.com and the Associated Press‘ online video network.

And finally – a slideshow…

…well, it’s much more than that really – De Volkskrant created an all-singing, all-dancing ‘slideshow’ with music, text, links, audio analysis and video giving an overview of the candidates, as well as a live results page for Tuesday’s results.

Yahoo: US papers grew online audience 6 per cent last year

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According to data released by Newspaper Association of America and compiled by Nielsen Online, the online readership of US newspapers grew about 6 per cent last year.

Online reach of newspapers grew to 38 per cent of all active online users, up from 36 percent in 2006.

Newspapers had an average of 60 million unique US visitors per month in 2007, up from 56.4 million the year before.

NYTimes.com launches Polling Place Photo Project and asks users to submit

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NYTimes.com has launched the Polling Place Photo Project, its bid to document the election year with photos taken by its readers.

The Times is asking for submissions of every polling location in America during the 2008 primaries and general election, so that it can compile an archive of voting in the US.

Images of the New Hampshire primaries have already been uploaded to the developing site.

New WSJ.com features to appeal to China

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Wall Street Journal Online launched today a multimedia feature for Chinese readers called ‘Beautiful Country’ – the Chinese name for America.

Li Yuan will write a column and provide video commentary describing how American business culture differs from that in China.

Both will appear in English and Chinese on wsj.com and chinese.wsj.com

Interactive maps and graphics will supplement the commentary.

More on the PR.

Guardian America

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The long awaited US-focused website from the Guardian has arrived – time to dig a little deeper into what Guardian America has to offer the reader (American or not).

  • Search: using the search facility on Guardian America is the same as using it on Guardian Unlimited. Results for a search on “Hilary Clinton” do not show any results for the America site despite an interview with the Clinton being its main interview of the day.

This is good and bad – after all the site is intended to link in with Guardian Unlimited, but this could be frustrating for US users using the search as a means of navigating around the US site.

  • Blogs: Comment Is Free and some of the site’s blogs have been up and running for US users for a while – a clever tactic as it has ensured active readers and commenters on the new site. Deadline USA seems to be the flagship blog for the new offering with a healthy dose of US political news.
  • Homepage: American content at the top of each section – Guardian Unlimited content tacked on at the bottom. Yes, this may be a little unfair – it’s the first day so this format is likely to change – but having British sports stories slap bang in the middle of what is meant to be a US version seems inconsistent and is surely off-putting for a reader.

It will be interesting to see how the site develops, particularly to see how much this it fulfils its remit as a dedicated US platform as opposed to just another section of the main website.