Mobile newsrooms and live blogging
The Shelby Star in Cleveland County, N.C. is far ahead of the tech curve as far as most newspapers go. Their new gadget, the Star Car, is an amazing mobile newsroom.
What is the Star Car?
The Star Car is a mobile interactive newsroom. Reporters drive it to wherever something is happening that you need to know about, turn on the equipment, and they can report live online.
You can even track the Star Car and see where it’s been, and there’s an in-dash camera so you can watch the car as it’s on the way to news! How cool is that? How incredible and innovative!
The Wichita Eagle in Kansas also used some technology to blog about a murder trial — live from inside the courtroom. In this incredible post by the technolo-j blog, the reporter explains his work process during the trial.
The Kansas Bureau of Investigations so liked the reporter’s work that they are using one of his SoundSlides presentations about manufacturing meth as training material.
The writer, court reporter Ron Sylvester, talked about how much time it actually took to write the stories once he got back to the newsroom. The results surprised me:
On workflow, the stories for print were actually easier, because of the live updates I’d filed all day. After court ended, I could go online, take the best of what I wanted to use, cut and paste it into a story, write a new lead and smooth out the transitions. Basically, the updates saw me writing out my notes live. I knew I had the audio for backup, recording the entire trial.
With the time I would have used writing stories from scratch, I added multimedia components with the slide shows and some audio clips of phone calls made the day of the shooting by the sheriff and his deputies.
I got emails from readers who called the updates “addictive.”
A recent murder trial covered by my paper had incredible hits on the Web site. If we could have gotten permission to blog live as the trial was happening, the site probably would have generated a ton more hits throughout the day as people were looking for up-to-the-minute updates.
I am so excited and enthusiastic about the possibilities, but I have to keep reminding myself, slow steps and deep breaths. Not everyone welcomes technology.