Next week, I’ll be a credentialed blogger covering speeches by the three leading presidential candidates at the joint conference and expo of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and Newspaper Association of America. While the opportunity to report on the appearances of Sens. McCain, Obama, and Clinton before the nation’s newspaper executives is interesting enough, I’m also excited because I’ll get to test the capabilities of CoverItLive (CIL) for collaboration and multimedia coverage of spot news.
If all goes well with this tool, I should be able to involve my students at The College of New Jersey while doing tag-team reporting with my colleague Laurie White, a fellow contributing editor at BlogHer.
Here’s my plan:
1. Promotion. I’ve got three potential audiences for my reporting: my personal blog, BlogHer, and Lawrence Update — a demonstration hyperlocal news sitea I’ve been building with students in my interactive journalism class. I posted announcements to each site that included widgets allowing readers to sign up for a reminder.
2. Preparation. My students and I will use CIL’s “show prep” feature to upload in advance of the speeches video, audio, data and other information that might be useful while liveblogging. For example, my students have done some local man-on-the-street interviews about the election. When the candidates say something relevant to those concerns, I can open the show prep folder and drop in relevant prepared content. Of course, my students will be able to participate in the live blog and comment as well.
3. Collaboration. CIL allows a blogger to designate up to five people as “producers” and/or “panelists.” A producer has the same ability that the blog writer has to moderate comments and to insert new content into the liveblog. Designating Laurie as a producer for my project allows us to do team coverage. She plans to shoot video as well, and CIL will allow her to upload her clips quickly and efficiently. CIL also has a private messaging function that we can use to make sure we’re on the same page.
4. Distribution. By embedding our CIL code at each site, we’ll be able to syndicate the blogs to each location simultaneously.
It will be interesting to see whether having all of these tools at the ready will enrich the coverage of the event while giving my students the experience of working as a team to cover a major news story. I can’t wait to find out!
(More info: Barbara Iverson and I have written about CoverItLive previous for Tidbits. Also, just yesterday Poynter’s Mallary Jean Tenore discussed this tool in her article: Live Blogging: How It Makes Us Better Journalists.)
