Cover It Live for live games

I would heavily advise allowing free and open commenting in a reporter's game blog, unless that reporter knows for sure the person commenting can be relied on not to write something which shouldn't appear otherwise.

I've found for the most part that if you explain to readers that this is a moderated commenting process and not every comment will go live, due to the content, not having time to get to it or just the volume of comments coming in, they are pretty understanding.

 

I'm considering doing CIL this fall for prep football as another platform to the Twitter account we have for the radio station and the team we're covering. If I do it, then I need to balance doing CIL with tracking down scores throughout the night.

 

We've used CIL extensively for big games and had really good response from fans. Last December, when there were two local teams playing for state championships at the same time in different locations, we had two going at once. I did one of the chats, one of our good freelancers did the other, and our SE pretty much moderated comments for both from his living room.

What we've found, in addition to real-time interaction and chats, is our volume of replays is huge. We did one afternoon chat with one of our sister papers before a big college football game. We had maybe 150 people online during the chat, but between the two papers, we had somewhere around 12,000 replays of the chat ... and this was just beat reporters from the two teams jabbering about the game.

 

Is there a cost involved to use this? Sounds pretty neat, especially on football friday nights around where I am...

 

Nope. It's free.

 

We cover a 4-county area (about 15 high schools) and we've kicked around the idea of using Cover It Live on Friday nights during football season to serve as a "Football Central" for our area.

There is one freelancer who helps us a lot -- writing isn't his strength but he is a good reporter and knows a lot about area schools. Our thought is to have him at one of the big games for the week, providing live coverage from the press box as well as updating the scoreboard for the other games, etc. The rest of us would call in scores to him and maybe even send in a few photos at halftime.

Has anyone else tried anything like that and had success? One possible (big) snafu is just getting web access at many of our rural schools. I wonder, too, what the interest level would be from readers during the games. Maybe a post-game chat/"wrap-up show" would be better...

 

A related question -- are there alternatives to getting on the internet to use CIL if the press box you are sitting in doesn't have wireless internet access (or any internet access)? Can you go through a cell phone instead? Does that cost a lot?

Just curious -- obviously, I'm not the tech geek on our staff... ;-)

 

If you don't have internet access, you can set the CiL blog to post Twitter updates, so that's one way to get around it. Of course, you'd need someone back at the home office to make the blog live and put it on your site.

 

I don't like this idea all that much because the strength of CIL to me is the ability to interact. You lose some of that without internet access.

 

True. I was just saying it still can be usable if you have no internet access. Obviously full-function would be preferred.

 

Turns out CiL has an iPhone app for use to post, moderate, etc.:
http://www.coveritlive.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=243&Itemid=195

 

Wow, good to know. Thanks.