Posts Tagged ‘live-blogging’

Live-Blogging Breaking News – A Good Idea?

Shooting suspect in Toronto subway shootingYesterday morning, at roughly 10:45am, a gunman opened fire in a subway station in downtown Toronto.

That incident alone was guaranteed to generate news interest; however one newspaper’s coverage caught my interest.

The Globe and Mail newspaper used Cover It Live (which I’ve used in the past) to live-blog its coverage following the shooting, complete with (moderated) user comments. I’ve embedded the coverage below.

This is a short post, as I want to hear your feedback.

My take: this is a great experiment. I tuned-in after a couple of hours, but found it very helpful to see real-time updates as developments broke and more information came to life.

One important point to remember: this coverage is after the fact; note that when this started they’d already updated their breaking news story. In my view, this is simply a different medium for reporting the news, albeit a very modern one.

So, what do you think about this experiment? Take a look at the coverage below.

What’s your take on the way the Globe covered the shooting? Is this kind of reporting effective? What would improve it? Is it, as one person suggested, a privacy issue in your eyes? Does this means of reporting news work for you?

 

(Thanks to Mathew Ingram for helping me to embed the coverage)

Update: CTV employee and former globeandmail.com staffer Bill Doskoch gives his take here, and Mathew Ingram has also given his thoughts on live-blogging news.

Mesh Day 2 – Live Blog

Live-Blogging Mesh Day 1 – What Did You Think Of CoverItLive?

I tend to live-twitter conferences etc. It’s fun, it’s interactive and it keeps a good record of the event for my future reference.

However, Twitter’s reliability recently has been… well… awful. During the introductions to the opening day of Toronto’s Mesh Conference yesterday, I suddenly thought:

“What happens if Twitter goes down (again) today?”

CoveritLiveOn a whim, I decided to give live-blogging tool CoveritLive a try.

From a blogger’s perspective, the tool is fantastic. It took me literally a minute to set up, it let me easily manage the blogging process and it looked good on my site.

Part-way through the day and whaddya know? Twitter went down. At that point I starteded noticing a few regular comments on my site from the same people. On another whim, I decided to ask them if they wanted to participate in the blog. By lunch time, I had Leah Jones (Edelman), Andrew Cherwenka (Trapeze) and Katie Paine (KD Paine & Partners) all blogging away on my site, as smoothly as could be.

(On a related note, while the content was streamed using Cover It Live during the event, it let me download the code locally later. I plan on splitting out the different sessions into separate posts to simplify things when I have a second.)

Here’s my question to you – what did you think of CoveritLive? Was it useful? Did you like the way it looked? Was having people blogging simultaneously from different sessions just too much?

Did CoveritLive work for you?