CoveritLive listens to users, improves usability

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?

coveritlive, Gawker Media, live blogging, Liverpool Daily Post, valleywag

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Liverpool Daily Post uses CoverItLive while producing newspaper

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]

coveritlive, Fake Steve Jobs, live blogging, Liverpool Daily Post, Newspaper

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