Digital and social media are sometimes thought of as being part of a self-contained bubble, but they often work best with traditional media. Recently, environmental journalist Osha Gray Davidson offered an intriguing example of this on the members-only discussion list of the Society of Environmental Journalists (quoted here with his permission).
Davidson publishes The Phoenix Sun, a syndicated online news and analysis site covering solar power from the American Southwest. He described how, from May 19-20, he live-blogged and tweeted the House energy and climate bill during markup.
Davidson wrote: “I find the CSPAN channels the most riveting programming on TV. So, this experiment in new media was partly an excuse to watch old media. But it was the combination of the two that made this interesting and — judging by the response — valuable.”
Here’s how it worked:
Davidson has twin computer monitors. He streamed CSPAN’s live coverage of the markup session on one screen and opened The Phoenix Sun site on the other. He uses a WordPress plugin that makes liveblogging easy. “Just type in your update, hit enter and, voila!” he wrote. “It appears on your site in chronological order, date and time-stamped automatically.”
For each liveblogging post, he separately tweeted a shorter version of the update using the Twitter client software TweetDeck with a link driving traffic to his site. He acknowledged that this may not have been the most efficient method but said it worked.
He also included many relevant hashtags, such as #climatebill and #ASES (American Solar Energy Society) to increase his visibility among Twitter users who weren’t already following him but who were interested in this legislation.
The results: “During the day-and-a half I was liveblogging, my site showed 142 hits from unique visitors and 353 downloads of HR 2454 from my site,” he said. “Small potatoes for some, but for my site that’s pretty good. Several of the visits were from computers in congressional offices, and most of those showed repeated visits.”
It’s impossible to tell how many people read Davidson’s tweets, but his number of Twitter followers grew by 36 percent over this period.
Journalists Kate Sheppard of Grist.org, Jeremy Blanchard (who started a Tumblr blog to track the climate bill), and Meghan McNamara of Exchange Monitor pitched in to collaborate on this coverage. They wrote short essays about the experience.
Davidson said that, overall, he found this to be a constructive learning and journalistic experience. “There’s definitely a learning curve to liveblogging and tweeting simultaneously,” he said. “But I ended the experiment feeling psyched about the possibilities for using these new tools. Especially about the potential to coordinate coverage with a pool of environmental journalists.”
