Cover It Live

Has anyone out there tried this? We've used it for some council meetings and for a baseball playoff game, and it has worked pretty well (much better than our Twitter misadventures). The big drawback being that we are asking our reporters to keep up with yet one more thing while they're trying to cover an event.

 

Yup. They had me doing in-game live chats last season. It actually wasn't terrible ... and it was easier for me than, say, a live in-game blog.

If the action got too intense or there was a reason I needed to ramp up the focus, I could easily put the chat aside for a few possessions or an entire quarter or whatever I needed.

We had sort of a "moderator" back at the office who could fill in the gaps when I had to step away for a while to do my job.

 

We've used it for HS events, with decent success.

As someone who's used a blog to provide live updates on games, it seems like I'd much prefer to use this, plus it give the opportunity for 'viewers' to ask questions, and give it a nice level of interactivity.

 

Used this for the NCAA tournament at the Pepsi Center two years ago. One person uploaded photos, one person had updates with what was going on back at campus and I did game analysis. It flowed very well and others who were on the Web site were able to interact.

It works well since multiple users can be logged on and give different angles, but it does create the problem of something else to do during the game. Works a helluva lot better than Twitter and can be easily uploaded onto a Web site for use as a stand-alone. Plus, the 140 (or 160)-character limit is not a factor, so more detail can be put into each post.

 

Did it all last season while covering hockey. I used to get a couple of hundred people a game on there. Of course, I hardly watched the game.

 

And I think this is really my only gripe with it. The bosses are talking about using this during football season, and the reporters and I are trying to tell them it's not feasible unless we have a second person at the game just to do this (i don't think they're going to go for that, though).

 

Honestly, it ought to work better for football than basketball. Lots of downtime in football between downs for adding pithy comments to the discussion. Do that in basketball, and you just missed a fast break.

What I did for basketball was to chat during timeouts and quarter breaks and stuff.

 

I don't know, in football you're going to have to be keeping your own stats, and likely play-by-play, in addition to doing this? That's a ton of stuff to do before the next snap.

 

Yeah. I had to do it for basketball this past season. It wasn't easy. At all. I felt like I missed the majority of the game. But for baseball and football, it works really well. Lots of interaction, lots of time (even in football, you get 30 seconds or so in between plays) to describe the action.
I couldnt imagine doing it for a HS football game though, if I was expected to keep my own stats. That seems like it would be next to impossible.

 

Oh, we're talking high school football? Shit yeah. Impossible to do.

 

Yeah, if you're getting a stat sheet and play-by-play handed to you at the end of each quarter and the end of the game like in college or the pros, I could certainly see doing it, but HS seems like it would be tough.

 

We did it for the state baseball tournament, and it worked great espeically given the team from our area in the tourney has a big-time following. For any other sport, a second person is probably required.