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The Digital Edge Blog focuses on developments, trends, best practices and more in newspaper digital media. The blog launched in 2006 (archives before August 2008 are here).
We look forward to reading your comments and contributions to the Digital Edge Blog. Questions? E-mail Beth Lawton at beth.lawton@naa.org.
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NewsOK Covers Ice Storm with Dashboard Cam, Chat
 NewsOK, the Web site of The Oklahoman, got creative with their live coverage of an ice storm that blanketed the region Tuesday by sending reporters out to cover road conditions from a car.
Of course, the newspaper posted breaking news stories (about the weather, about people falling and about how swamped the area's emergency medical services were) and the newspaper posted school closings online.
In addition, the newspaper sent two videographers out in a Jeep with a laptop, a wireless card and a video camera.
The image to the right is a box that appeared on the home page of NewsOK.com.
The reporters set up the video camera on the car's dashboard and drove around area highways and city streets, live streaming video of local road conditions.
At the same time, the reporter who was not driving handled a CoveritLive Web chat with site visitors, giving them information about where the reporters were, how fast they were going and much more. The multimedia coverage also included Twitter and Flickr.
In addition to being highly engaging, the video and chat provided a public service to people considering leaving work early before the roads worsened as the storm continued through the afternoon.
A screengrab of NewsOK.com/live from around 3:18 p.m. CT is below. (By the way, the live video has clickable breaking news headlines scrolling across the player.)
Here are some of the comments that came into the CoveritLive stream at (exactly) 3:15 p.m. today (they had a few glitches with the Mogulus-powered video stream):
[Comment From hfwallace] NewsOk's weather page rules.
[Comment From Dan] it is back up. you guys are doing a great job.
[Comment From Guest] is it the newcastle area on 44?
[Comment From Dispatch] moore schools out tomorrow...
[Comment From Kurtis] How fast are you driving?
The response about that last question came in three minutes later from the NewsOK team in the car - they were traveling about 45 mph at the time.
In an e-mail to NAA, Opubco's VP of the News and Information Center Kelly Dyer Fry commented that the video stream and live chat are rather addicting once you start watching. I'm interested in seeing how the NewsOK.com time-spent-on-site metric increased for today.
Another smart idea: The banner ad at the top of NewsOK.com on the live coverage page was an ad for the newspaper's mobile traffic alerts.
Much more technical information about this project, including what equipment they used and how they set it up in the car, is on Director of Video Dave Morris' blog here.
Update 5:29 p.m. ET: We just got this information about NewsOK.com's Twitter and CoveritLive-based ice storm coverage, which started Tuesday morning. The following is from Multimedia Editor Mike Koehler:
About Twitter
We jumped on Twitter around 10 a.m. Monday when it looked like things were going to turn sour.
The most important thing I wanted to do was establish the tag everyone would use for this event. I posted a message on my personal Twitter account that it would be #OKIce and sent it out. I have a pretty good group of followers: a lot of the connecters in the OKC Twittering community.
Then, as we updated on the NewsOK Twitter account throughout the day, I made sure to tag all of our updates with #OKIce. I sent replies to anyone else who tweeted about the storm to do the same if they hadn't.
That tag allowed us to build a quick Twitter widget (a twidget) on our live page that fed all of the comments containing that tag. We did the same with a Flickr feed, as people used the #OKIce tag there as well.
One of our consistent updates to Twitter were links back to our site, especially our breaking news blog and our closings list (the most popular page of the day).
On Monday evening, I went to search.twitter.com, and there were about 400 updates from people using the #OKIce tag. By mid-day the City of OKC had picked it up, as well as some competing media.
Our videographers who were live streaming in the car were using a separate Twitter account (NewsOKtv) to update their location. We had a feed right under the video which scrolled those updates.
Followers for both account grew throughout the day
About CoveritLive
CoveritLive is a great tool that we have been using often, especially in sports. We do live chats for all Oklahoma and Oklahoma State football games, as well as whe our NBA team plays.
We launched the live chat in conjunction with the live video stream on Monday about 11 a.m. in order to have another stream of updates of readers, answering their questions and getting their views of what was happening outside.
Traffic grew and grew and grew throughout the day.
The give-and-take was remarkable in many ways. First, people were very interested in what our live-streamers were doing: where were they, how fast were they going, where were they going next.
Second, people started to ask and answer each others' questions: Who has been on this road, and how was it? Has anyone heard about this school closing? This was honest-to-goodness crowdsourcing, citizen journalism, whatever you want to call it. We became a hub for sharing information.
There were also updates from around the state, which really increased the range of our reporting.
By the end of the day, the chat was our most popular ever. We resumed it, along with the live streaming video, at 7 a.m. Tuesday.
(Thanks to Kelly Dyer Fry for helping coordinate this blog post.)
Published
Jan 27 2009, 04:54 PM
by
Beth Lawton
About Beth Lawton
Beth Lawton is manager, digital media communications in the Business Development division of the Newspaper Association of America. She writes and edits many of NAA’s Digital Edge reports and the Online Publishing Update.
Prior to joining NAA two years ago, she worked as a Web producer and editor in newsrooms in the Midwest and the Caribbean.
Beth is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis and Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism (MSJ New Media 2003).
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