by Al Tompkins Published Jan. 28, 2010 8:09 am Updated Mar. 4, 2011 9:57 am

Soon after President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address Wednesday night, news sites provided detailed break-downs of the president’s remarks and found creative ways to help the public make sense of them.

PBS NewsHour, for instance, produced a remarkable analysis of Obama’s speech. The annotated feature breaks the speech into bite-sized clips with links to resources for people who want to learn more about that specific topic. It’s pretty brilliant.

The New York Times juxtaposed the speech with people’s reaction to it on Facebook and Twitter. Readers can toggle from one to the other topic-by-topic. I have to say, I have never seen anybody do this before, and I think it’s a great feature that really helps serve the public. The time line at the top of the page lets readers/viewers find individual parts of the speech. Talk about interactivity.

National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” asked correspondents to drill down on specific and important topics to provide a sort of truth-test for some of the main issues Obama addressed. They asked, for example, whether a spending freeze can really save $1 trillion. Listen to what NPR did and ask yourself how you could use techniques like this for your mayor’s state of the city speech or your governor’s state of the state address.

The St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times’ PolitiFact highlighted quotes from the address and then looked at how true they were.

“We cut taxes for 95 percent of working families.”

  The key word is “working.”

“Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests – including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections.”

  Find out why Alito shook his head.

“At the beginning of the last decade … America had a budget surplus of over $200 billion. By the time I took office, we had a one-year deficit of over $1 trillion and projected deficits of $8 trillion over the next decade.

  Obama (mostly) nailed it on the numbers.

“We’ve excluded lobbyists from policymaking jobs.”

  PolitiFact found at least four.

The “pay-as-you-go law … was a big reason why we had record surpluses in the 1990s.”

  An economic boom and defense cuts were bigger reasons.

“Because of the steps we took, there are about 2 million Americans working right now who would otherwise be unemployed.”

  It’s a projection, and rosier than most.

“For the first time in history, my administration posts our White House visitors online.”

  Obama’s transparency boast requires explanation.

“On a government spending freeze.”

  Obama opposed a freeze in ’08.

If your newsroom did something creative to cover the speech, please comment on this piece and provide a related link. We would love to see it and learn from it, so tell us how you did it.

Tags: Best Practices, Best Practices: Reporting and Writing and Editing, Political and campaign reporting, Social media