You should see how creative journalists are getting in their coverage of the big ice and snow storm that's moving across the nation's midsection and heading east.
The Oklahoman's Web site, NewsOK.com, rolled a crew on the road armed with a laptop, camera and wireless connection and hooked it into
Mogulus to transmit the content online. In years past, these kinds of big weather stories were TV stories; now, anybody with a camera, laptop and a connection can go live.
Watch a video that I recorded off my computer screen Tuesday morning using
Snapz Pro X. The video shows the various features on NewsOK.com's home page at the time.
The NewsOK.com crew used
CoveritLive to chat with online readers. The live chat included constant news updates about how much sleet was falling, information from the city government and other relevant updates, such as one about a postal worker who fell on the ice and was seriously injured. Readers responded by telling the roving crew which streets to drive on and even where to stop for lunch.
The site also invited online readers to upload photos to
a Flickr page.
Dave Morris, News OK's director of video, explained the site's coverage on his blog:
We are using a Sony Vaio, a mini laptop.
We'd like to experiment with a netbook, which are pretty cheap these days. This Vaio is running Windows XP, and we're making it work. We've plugged a Cricket wireless card into the Vaio for wifi access to the Internet.
We have a Sony HVR camera placed on the dashboard, using a Firewire connection to the netbook. Our Internet feed is directed to Mogulus, which is then embedded onto the template of newsok.com/live.
Very simple. But it's working very well.
[Monday] morning, I met with Jones about this idea. We decided to go for it and see what level of quality we got. We've used the Cricket wireless cards in Norman during our live Campus Corner Pre Game Shows. The quality hasn't been this good. But, we're not using any audio on purpose to save bandwidth. We suspect this may be helping. Also, we are not running into thousands of people using their cell phones like at the game day situations.
I asked Mike Koehler, multimedia editor for the Oklahoma Publishing Company, about the coverage in this edited e-mail exchange:
Al Tompkins: Walk us through how you used CoveritLive and Twitter in your storm coverage.
Mike Koehler: We jumped on Twitter around 10 a.m. Monday when it looked like things were going to turn sour. The most important thing I wanted to do was to establish the tag everyone would use for this event. I posted a message on my personal account that it would be
#OKIce and sent it out. I have a pretty good group of followers, a lot of whom are from the Oklahoma City Twittering community. As we updated the NewsOK Twitter account throughout the day, I made sure to tag all of our updates with #OKIce. I sent replies to anyone else who tweeted about the storm to do the same if they hadn't already.
That tag allowed us to build a quick Twitter widget (a twidget) on our live page that fed all of the comments containing that tag. We did the same with a Flickr feed, and people used the #OKIce tag there as well. On Monday night, I went to
search.twitter.com, a search engine for Twitter, and saw about
400 updates from people using the #OKIce tag.
By mid-day, many in Oklahoma City had picked it up, as well as some competing media. Our videographers who were live streaming in the car were using a separate Twitter account (NewsOKtv) to post updates from their location. We had a feed right under the video that scrolled those updates. Followers for both accounts grew throughout the day.
What are your thoughts on CoveritLive?Koehler: CoveritLive is a great tool that we have been using often, especially in sports. We do live chats for all Oklahoma and Oklahoma State football games, as well as when our NBA team plays.
We launched the live chat in conjunction with the live video stream on Monday at about 11 a.m. to have another stream of updates for readers and to answer their questions and get their views on what was happening outside.
Traffic grew continuously throughout the day. The give-and-take was remarkable in many ways. First, people were very interested in what our live streamers were doing -- where they were, how fast they were going, where they were going next.
Second, people started to ask and answer each others' questions, such as: "Who has been on this road, and how was it?" and "Has anyone heard about this school closing?" This was honest to goodness crowdsourcing, citizen journalism, whatever you want to call it. We became a hub for sharing information.
There were also updates from around the state, which really increased the range of our reporting.
By the end of the day, the chat was our most popular ever. We resumed it, along with the live streaming video, at 7 a.m. Tuesday.
* * *
Other news organizations in Oklahoma have also been experimenting with different forms of weather coverage this week.
KWTV included live video from traffic cameras and a live radar image;
KFOR-TV dedicated the entire front page of its Web site to weather at one point on Tuesday; and
KOCO-TV in Oklahoma used a live blog as part of its coverage.
The Milwaukee
Journal Sentinel also experimented with a new way of covering weather when a heavy storm hit Milwaukee last month. Mike De Sisti, the paper's multimedia picture editor, tells me:
I had a wireless mic attached to me while I was driving around. I was able to explain to people the road conditions, and ask them where they wanted me to go. I was even telling jokes at the request of a person chatting with me.
It was one of the most fun days I've had in my career as a journalist. The ability to interact with viewers and receive and give instant feedback made this more than your average weather report. The best part was people would chat with me in Mogulus and let me know the locations they wanted to see. I would then drive there! We consistenly had about 200 people watching during the eight hours I was driving around. The wireless mic even allowed me to get out of my car and free a lady from a show drift for all to see.
These are just some examples of the weather coverage out there.
How has your news organization been covering weather in new ways? This is great to see, Al! We've started using Twitter...
