Cover It Live for live games

FYI - CoverItLive was just bought out by Demand Media. I thought that news might be of interest, since the split on SportsJournalists.com seems to be that Demand Media is either "the hell spawn of Satan" or "kind of whatever": http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-20038726-36.html

 

Wow, interesting news.

 

I'll throw my two cents in. I've used it twice for live events. Once for the bowl game, once for signing day. It was great for the bowl game. Some folks were using it as their primary source of information because they were overseas and could not access the telecast. Others just liked to get the perspective of people there.

But on signing day ... now that was when it was REALLY useful. You don't have 80,000k of your fans in the stadium and another million or so content to just watch on TV, not needing to crank up the laptop for additional info. What you had was a niche fan base DYING to get as much info as possible. So a live chat was great.

Having said that, as others said, it demands your full attention. I would not have the gamer writer doing this. It's hard enough to keep up when it has your full attention. Being the gamer guy would make it that much more difficult. What I did, is invite people to ask questions to anybody in our coverage team (talking bowl game here) and when they did, those guys were right next to me so I'd verbalize the question to them, then type their answer, in quotes, to the questioner.

It was quite an experience doing that. When I saw this thread, I was actually sort of debating in my head whether to pull it out for a couple of big games coming up: A big baseball series and maybe the spring game. Unfortunately, the school I cover is so bad in basketball right now that I won't bother with that.

 

Hey guys,

I used CIL this past weekend like I alluded to. Overall, it was a success. Essentially served as my game notes for my recap as well. Thanks to everyone for the feedback! It definitely helped me out.

 

Demand's purchase was news, but they also already had a relationship with CIL, so it wasn't a completely out-of-the-blue play.

We're also considering ScribbleLive, which has some pretty cool attributes, too.

 

Maybe it is because I'm used to it, but I like the way CoverItLive looks as opposed to ScribbleLive.

Plus, can get away with not paying for CiL. Not sure the pricing on Scribble, but hard to see it being so much better than free (or having a CiL ad come up, but you still pay nothing).

 

I understand what everyone is saying about having 1 person dedicated to just the live blog. But we (and I imagine most papers) have limited resources, and I have a hard time justifying sending 2 reporters to one event.

Is it asking too much of a reporter to run a CIL and cover a game?

I'm not trying to be smarmy here; I really want to know. To me, it seems like a reporter could use the CIL to keep track of the game rather than a pen and pad.

 

I'd say that depends entirely on what the deadline situation is. If the writer is on tight enough deadline that he needs to be writing during the game, then you could maybe expect him to do CiL for the first half and then stop. If it's a day game or there's no deadline pressure to write at all till after the game, then he could do it the whole time.

 

I agree Bobcat. I'd also add that it's more doable in baseball, which lends itself to looking away between pitches. It would be much tougher in a constant-action game like basketball

 

Oh, I'm sure it can be done. Not sure it can be done well.

 

That's sort of my point. I've heard writers say they can't do it. A lot of the time when one of my writers has said they can't do something, it meant they didn't want to learn a new way of doing things.

I don't want to be one of those editors who always says "do it anyway," but I also want to push my writers to keep trying new things and new ways of doing old things.

 

One problem you're going to run into with CIL is that you have to approve all comments.

If you have your reporter "OK" all users after they make their first comment (so they don't have to be approved for each and every comment they have), then that would help your guys out.