Exciting week last week. Well, it’s all relative I guess, but last week was one of those weeks when a big story broke and the newsroom mobilized. Grand Island is home to a growing community of refugees from Somalia who are predominantly Muslim. A lot of these people work for the big meat packing plant here. Last week over 500 of them walked off the job and marched in protest over the right to pray during Ramadan toward City Hall.

I was tweeting updates as I could catch them (one thing we have to work on is a plan for coverage online. I tweeted info I could glean from overhearing the journos and editors in their huddles, and what I could nick out of Newsedit as the reporter worked on the story. Looking back on it, I wonder if I should have gone out to the protests too so I could tweet updates. But then, I’m not a trained journo. I’m just the online chick who fixes it when a reporter forgets his/her password.)

Anyway, the story ended up spilling into the rest of the week as passions escalated, and non-Muslim workers staged counter-protests. Our comments in each story we put up were going through the roof. It occurred to me that this would be a perfect time to open up a liveblog, using Cover it Live, and invite our readers to come and talk about this issue.

Ohmygosh Thursday was absolutely crazy. I ended up keeping that chat open (and moderating it) for 12 hours straight. Every time I tried to end it, people would come in and start the conversation over again. I also opened it back up on Friday – and while it was a little slower because the fury was dying down and everything was getting back to normal, I still had to wind up the discussion between several people at the end.

I was also able to get quick answers for readers wanting to know more info because I have the best access to the reporters covering the story. And to their awesome credit, they were quick to get back to me with answers.

What did I learn from the liveblog? Most surprising was that I could embed it in Zope :) Originally, I put it in my newsroom blog which is where people go to answer the daily poll. But I decided it needed to be more prominent, so on a whim, I embedded it as a story on the front of the site. Bingo.

Here are the final stats:

Total Blog Page Hits: 1310
Total Unique Viewers: 902
Avg. Unique Viewer Duration on Blog: 30 min.
Replays Viewed: 49

We used the Liveblog once a week during our Music Madness tournament to “ok” results. The stats above are three times better than all 6 weeks of MM liveblogging, and it was only open for around 20 hours total. That’s phenomenal.

Feedback included:

  • Reporter coming back from District Court told me that all of the employees there were watching the chat with great interest, and asked him all about it.
  • Late Thursday night, rumours were going around about a riot happening at the plant. The chat was still going, and I got a call from one of the copy desk editors who was watching the chat, and he wanted to let me know our reporter would have details about it online shortly. This is awesome to me because it means that maybe the newsroom will start thinking to include me in the loop when this happens. It means they were paying attention to the chat to see what readers were saying. That more than makes up for the disappointing meeting we had last week.
  • Readers were actually disappointed when I told them I had to close it up Friday at 5pm.

I think the newsroom got a glimpse of an awesome tool in use for something more than just for fun. I think they could see the value in it. I think if I’m able to wow them now and then with things like this, my stubborn newsroom may just come around someday.

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