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Written on 8th January 2009
10 COMMENTS 
Paul Vereijken, Next Web Journalism & Media editor
About a year ago live blogging service CoveritLive launched. If live blogs weren’t popular before late 2007 they sure are now. There always have been live blogs of course – blogs covering Apple Keynotes for example. But thanks to its easy setup and user interface CoveritLive gave live blogging a bang.
At almost every tech, media or web conference in the world a blogger is live blogging. CoverItLive even connects old and new media, Ernst – Jan wrote last summer. And during the terrorist attack in Mumbai two Dutch journalism students used CoveritLive to collect all the news about the bombings. Live blogging is getting serious and therefore it’s time to look at the future.
New tool, old trick
Apart that live blogging is of course live it isn’t anything different from usual blog postings. The bloggers posts text and adds links, photos and videos and the readers can comment.
Still I wonder how the future of live blogging looks like. Some of my thoughts:
- Will news corporations like the BBC or big newspapers like The New York Times use it to cover breaking news like a terrorist attack?
- Or is it already outdated and is live video streaming the future?Why would I want to read a live blog when I can see what is happening because somebody is streaming from a phone or camera?
- And isn’t it just much more comfortable to read a blog posts after the speaker finished his presentation?
It’s in the mix
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying live blogs aren’t of any value. They sure are! I followed lots of Steve Jobs’ Keynotes thanks to live blogs. Live coverage is great when you don’t want to miss a thing.
But they aren’t very usefull when you want to check what happened a day after the conference or when you want to re-read about the Mumbai bombings. For analysis, summaries of a presentation, reports with lots of links and extra information I want just plain and normal postings. And when it gets so interesting that I can’t keep my eyes away from the screen only a live video stream can satisfy me.
Personally I like the mix of blogging, live blogging and video streams. Blog posts to sum up what’s happened and give extra information or analyse the breaking news, a live blog that drops some lines every five minute and a video stream for the ones glued to the screen. That is the future of live blogging for me.
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[Photo by Adam Tinworth]
Written on 12th December 2008
1 COMMENT
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
CoveritLive is one of my favorite blogging services that has launched lately. Particularly because they’re bridging gaps between the old and new media. The usage of the service has skyrocketed the last couple of months, 3,000,000 plus readers now follow live events via the software each month.
Therefore, the CoveritLive team has decided to launch a search feature - as they now have enough content to make such a technology relevant.
So let’s give it a shot. I’m at Youthwatching ‘09 now, an event about youth culture and marketing in Ghent, Belgium. Success! A simple search query gives me the desired result. CandyBlog is covering the event.
I can’t think of another way than using the search feature as I showed in this post. It’s not that I feel the urge to follow a random event out of the blue. Do you?
An archive function would also be interesting. Imagine you want to catch up with a conference you’ve missed, CoveritLive would be at your service to track it down.
By the way, users can always to choose to exclude their live blog from the search results.
Written on 27th November 2008
6 COMMENTS
Paul Vereijken, Next Web Journalism & Media editor
You don’t need to be a big news corporation like CNN or BBC to cover breaking news. Dutch journalism students Loek Essers and Peter van der Ploeg proved that last night. The two used live blogging tool CoverItLive to cover the terrorist attack in India.
Twitter
Loek and Peter started their live blog by adding some breaking news Twitter feeds. They added CNN, BBC and BreakingNewsOn. To enrich the coverage they posted some news themselves and added tweets of Twitter users in Mumbai. Later on the students found out that Indian news channel IBN was the source of most off the coverage news corporations like CNN used. IBN posted photo’s and video’s on their website which Loek and Peter embedded on their live blog. Photo’s posted on Flickr were shown on the live blog too.
Dutch newspaper
Journalism students Loek and Peter showed how easy the web and (live) blogging made it to cover breaking news. And although the two started their live blog as an experiment they got rewarded. Dutch free newspaper De Pers used the live blog on their website.
Written on 11th September 2008
0 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
A company that really seems to get how to handle user feedback is Canada-based CoveritLive. This start-up provides web publishers with a liveblogging widget. The last couple of months, their user-base and reach has been growing, partly thanks to the Olympics and the American political conventions. During such large events, several bloggers and journalists have kept their readers up to date with short Twitter-like messages in a completely customizable frame.
Your will is their command?
Some publishers had some problems though, which they shared via the Get Satisfaction-based support center. Gawker Media, known for e.g. Valleywag, asked for a picture ‘zoom’ feature when there is a larger or higher resolution picture available (paparazzi pics probably). Liverpool Daily Post, liveblogging the production of their newspaper, wanted pictures to be shown in the body of the live blog instead of a popup window. Well, they both got what they asked for.
Private messages
There were also some complaints buzzing around in the blogosphere about private messaging options and allowing other people to update. CoveritLive made a first attempt in fixing this by offering a private backchannel messaging for publishers and their co-publishers. That will save livebloggers a lot of email traffic during conferences and happenings like that.
Solid 2.0 company
I’m not surprised by the growth of CoveritLive, which had 1.6 million unique viewers, 5.5 million pageviews, and 40 million minutes of readership in the past 30 days. As you might have noticed this is not the first positive post I’ve written about the liveblog tool. They’re just a great example of a solid 2.0 company which bridges gaps between the new and old world AND listens to its customers. At least, that’s what I assume. Or do they only listen to top dogs like Gawker?
Written on 6th June 2008
5 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Although I’m not a big fan of live blogging – I would rather write an article right after the presentation — I do admire the team behind CoveritLive. They’re making blogging more mainstream by building bridges between traditional media and new media. Its easy UI, good functionality, and no-nonsense approach make it easy to convince people to get some live blogging 2.0 going on. The Liverpool Daily Post for example, showed its readers how a typical day in the editor’s room looks by live blogging for 17 hours. These English journalists are pioneers, but they’re certainly not the only ones exploring the new frontiers.
Belgium newspaper La Libre used CoveritLive to keep worried tennis fans up to date during the Justine Henin retirement announcement. American regional television stations have warned their viewers for tornadoes and wildfires and collected eye witness accounts from across the disaster area. These news media only had to place a widget on their site. After that it was just a matter of doing what they’re payed for: report. Users can browse to the site and look up the widget. That’s more accessible than, for example, a Twitter feed as it doesn’t look too abstract for less-experienced Internet users.
Lowering the barriers of live blogging
With its growing popularity, CoveritLive has found the resources to add some new features that improve its accessibility.
- Users can now add their own logo to the widget and adjust color, fonts and whatnot so that the CoveritLive screen blends in with the rest of the site.
- CoveritLive has added dedicated media servers, attached a one GB outgoing pipe and improved the compression technology of the pictures so that users can live post pictures without too much hassle.
- There’s a new support center which will help less-experienced web users to set up and run a live blog
- Every self respecting hip Web 2.0 service adds an iPhone client, so does CoveritLive.
There’s an advantage for journalists
Apart from its accessibility, another reason for the success of CoveritLive is that it simply fulfills a need of journalists: live reporting without any hassle. They don’t need blogging software for writing editorial pieces, as they can just use the existing content management systems. But those programs weren’t build for quick reporting. So that’s why they now embrace a technology that most of them have maligned for quite some time.
Written on 13th May 2008
2 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
During Web 2.0 Expo, Dan Lyons aka Fake Steve Jobs called upon all media companies to look at the bright side of the digital revolution: “Media business are focusing on the destruction of their business and therefore lose sight.” I couldn’t agree more with this man. So I was happily surprised when David Petherick mailed me an example of a newspaper that seems to get what’s going on in their industry. The Liverpool Daily Post, a regional newspaper, is using CoveritLive to live blog the production of tomorrow’s paper:
Over the next 17 hours, members of our team will be logging on to this blog to talk about what they doing, and how the Liverpool Daily Post is put together.
Editor Mark Thomas, deputy editor Alison Gow, news editor Andy Kelly, sports editor Richard Williamson, business editor Bill Gleeson and features editor Emma Johnson are involved with this unique experiment and will write a story for the paper about their experiences as well. So why are they doing this?
It’s an attempt to get our online readers more involved in what we do on a daily basis.
Sounds good and daring. And I must say, I’m impressed by the amount of messages they have been posting. The number of comments is also pretty high, yet the news editors might need some more time to answer them. As one of the most important parts of the digital revolution is the growing need of people to interact with media professionals.
All in all, this initiative of the Liverpool Daily Post is a good example of the attitude media companies should have. Some optimism in this business doesn’t hurt anybody, in fact, it’s exactly what it needs. Especially now The Guardian Journalist Nick Davies has pointed out with his book Flat Earth News that British newspapers basically just copy/paste from the newswire of the Press Association. A bit of transparency is the least that newspapers can do to win back their audience’s trust.
[WebTipr: David Petherick]
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