The internet team jumped on the technology wagon this year to cover the state baseball championships. We thought we did a pretty good job last year covering Astoria’s state championship win, but knew we could do better. Because our current CMS is limited in a lot of ways, we started researching what was new for technology in the online world. Over the past year we had discovered a variety of new ways to report live events and we have been eager to try every one of them out. We had tested many of them, but never in a live setting, and the state championships provided us the perfect opportunity.
As with last year, this year we provided videos and slideshows, photo reprints and a final story.
Last year we tried updating the site with Twitter. We soon realized that we were only allowed so many tweets per hour, which limited not only the number of updates, but also each tweet only allows 140 characters. Twitter does offer great benefits though, and we still used this platform to announce our coverage, the live blogging, videos and web cam.
Another platform we tried last year was wix.com. This allowed us to create a dynamic-looking page, which incorporated our twitter feed of updates, and allowed a rotation of photos to be displayed on either site of our Twitter feed, but that was about it. Wix is a way to create free flash products for websites. We didn’t use the wix.com platform this year.
Cover-It-Live, which we used this year with Sue Cody at the helm, gave us the ability to instantly update our website with very little effort, saving us a lot of time to get the information to the audience instead of only updating the site every so often throughout the game.The average liveblog is replayed and is watched by an audience two-thirds the size of the live audience, according to Cover-It-Live. We have used this live blogging during elections and a turkey talk last fall. We see great potential for this sort of platform to make our sites competitive when there are live radio or television broadcasts of the same event or a way to engage our users on a topic or theme and for us to interact with them directly and instantaneously.
This year we utilized the two iPhones we had on our team.
We used Jason Nagy’s iPhone to stream live from the Astoria and Knappa dugouts using ustream.com and embedded the player on our state baseball pages. Even though we had the capability to stream audio through the phone, we chose to just stream video.
The Ustream platform not only allowed users to view it on our website, but the Ustream website and via the Ustream app (if a reader had it on their mobile phone). This was the first time we were able to use this on a live event. This is another platform that has great potential for our sites in breaking news, broadcasting live from events, etc. We used Ustream to broadcast the Ayran Nations meeting in John Day using a video camera and a computer, but with the ability to do the same on the iPhone has unlimited potential. The only drawback is arming staff with iPhones and the training.
For the other iPhone, we used Crindalyn Lyster’s to serve up live play-by-plays and stats online through the GameChanger platform. (See my related post on GameChanger)This allowed fans, local media and others to follow the Astoria and Knappa’s ‘GameStream,’ for those who couldn’t be at the game. We used the GameChanger iPhone/iPod touch application to physically score each game. Every play and update recorded by the “scorekeeper” on the app – every hit, run and strike – was instantly posted online. Dozens of post-game statistics were automatically compiled for every player.
We were very pleased with the coverage we did this year and were excited that we got the chance to cover two games. The Knappa vs Heppner game gave us the chance to show off this technology on the East Oregonian website as well since they cover Heppner. With all new technology there are some hurdles to overcome to get everyone on board, but we do have the ability on a limited basis to utilize all of these platforms throughout the company. One thing that was a great missed opportunity was the potential for sponsorships for not only our state baseball page, but also our videos, the live web cam, the live blog, etc. We were unable to find anyone willing to take the offer in the short turn-around time.
Link to our state baseball page on the Daily Astorian: http://www.dailyastorian.com/main.asp?SectionID=37&SubSectionID=1256
This year’s state baseball coverage team: Gary Henley, Sue Cody, Jason Nagy and Crindalyn Lyster
