Cover It Live

Big thumbs up to CoverItLive. Of course, I'm not there to write a story, just blog. But we get a lot of comments and discussion going. I've been trying to get the ad dept. to try and sell this, but they really have no fucking clue unless it is a big-ticket front-page ad.

 

Did it in spring training. Blogged so much missed most of the game. Nobody read it

 

Used it multiple times for high school events, mostly softball and baseball state games where the stats are provided. We also did it at the state football games, but again, stats were provided. There's no way to do it while trying to keep stats.

It's a great program, though, and as has been mentioned, is MUCH easier to do than updating a blog because it's instantaneous. It's very easy to set up, as well. I'm sure we'll be doing a lot more of them.

 

It's easier than anything else you are going to find for live blogging. Much quicker and more reader friendly than your typical CMS.

 

We've used it in a variety of ways. I think it's a great program.
We would drop in my Twitter feed, so I could update that audience with the key stats at the end of each quarter and it would instantly go into the CoverItLive chat window.
At high school games, we've had one person "moderate" while the other takes stats and writes the gamer. The second person posts only during timeouts and such.
Is it hard work to make it all (chat, Twitter, game story) happen? Yeah. But if 500-1,000 people want to go to us for instant updates, then I am more than willing to provide it. After all, providing news is our job.

 

Love Cover It Live. The interactive polls and the scoreboard are great touches that make it far superior to a simple running blog.

 

Don't forget about taking pics.

 

I'm a big fan of Coveritlive. Easy to manage, and the scoreboard function adds something to a live chat, so every third question isn't "what's the score" or "what inning is it?" ... polls are great, too.

 

Couple of prep writers in upstate NY are also using it as a nice tool for weekly online chats from the office, yakking about game predictions, projected all-star teams, etc.

Guy in Buffalo whose name escapes me throws a lot of personality into, draws pretty good crowds online.

 

Last year, our sports department did live broadcasts of high school games. We would broadcast two games per week sometimes. I had one computer playing one game, and another computer broadcasting the other.

Then I was receiving texts from two reporters at the other two games in our coverage area and I was live blogging about all four games at once from the office.

Readers who clicked on the page could read the live blog, which had stats and score updates for all four games and choose one of the two games to listen to.

We even had some taped segments for halftime where the sports guys did a roundtable talk show, scrolling scores at the bottom of the broadcast window, commercials and constantly-updated photo galleries.

It was pretty cool. We put a lot of time and man power into it, but we were getting a big portion of our readership tuning in. And web hits were way up.

 

Keith McShea is the preps guru there, and yeah, the BuffNews is heavy into the live chats and game blogging. I talked to him about it a couple of months ago -- he used the live-blog as his play-by-play for the state championship FB games he covered, but only because they had a stat crew. Said he probably wouldn't do that for a regular-season game when he's keeping his own stats. For hoops, he keeps a running play-by-play and blogs on the side, then jots down the totals from the scorebook.

 

I've done it, but it can be hard to moderate comments depending on how fast they were coming in.

I posted it on my blog to get ready for a chat during a scrimmage last fall. Then, I made the hour-long trip to the stadium (team is about that far away from our paper), and during the drive, one of the team's SIDs saw it and decided to copy me and do a CoverItLive chat of his own on the school's athletics Web site.

Since then, pretty much every time I have an idea and implement it, they implement a similar one a few days/weeks/months down the line.