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.
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?
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.
Channel 4 News is set to use liveblogging service CoveritLive to report on today’s House of Commons debate on the proposed 42-day pre-charge detention period for terrorism suspects.
Terror Blog Live! will cover the debate, which will begin after Prime Minister’s questions, and continue the coverage during the show’s 7pm bulletin after the plans have been voted on.
Questions submitted by readers through CoveritLive will then be put to the programme’s studio guests.
Liveblogging service CoverItLive has introduced a branded option for its embeddable blogging service – thanks to Simon Dickson’s Puffbox blog for pointing this out.
Publishers can now build custom templates to apply their logo or masthead to the liveblog.
The service was recently used by the Lancashire Evening Post for a feature on the UK’s pub industry and the Liverpool Daily Post to open up the paper’s editorial operations.
Following on from their live coverage of a day in the paper’s offices, the Liverpool Daily Post are once more experimenting with liveblogging to cover a royal visit to the city.
The Post is using service CoveritLive to report on the visit and provide rapid, real-time updates on what’s happening.
This is a strategic operation reporters and videojournalists, who are stationed at different positions to capture the visit, posting updates and links to multimedia coverage.
Lessons learned from the previous experiment have been put into practice this time around and it’s attracting plenty of questions and reader reactions.
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.
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.
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:
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.