I encourage editors to follow live coverage of the Associated Press Managing Editors convention starting today in St. Louis.
The digital-only coverage of APME09 by University of Missouri students might help you in four ways:
- If you’re attending the convention, it will enhance your understanding of the events and issues.
- If you’re not attending the convention, it will allow you to follow the discussions.
- Either way, it might help you rethink how you cover big events in your community.
- It might help you think differently about what “Web-first” coverage means.
APME asked me to consult with faculty at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at Missouri in planning digital-only coverage. For years, APME has had students provide coverage of the convention in a newspaper distributed daily during the conference. At some point, they started putting that coverage online. But like most newspapers, the online coverage was little more than a digital version of the print coverage. (I heard from someone involved in previous APME coverage that an effort to do something more was discouraged, not unlike lots of newsrooms.)
And frankly, print thinking continues to dominate most digital publication from newspaper-oriented newsrooms. “Web-first” too often means our print-oriented coverage goes online before we print it. We need to move toward a mindset, workflow, planning and execution in which we produce content independently of products, as NPR is doing in its Create Once, Publish Everywhere approach.
This year APME attendees will not receive a newspaper. The convention coverage is all-digital. APME asked me to help them think about how to approach coverage differently without the print focus.
I will not be at the convention, and my plan was for an unlimited number of student journalists covering the convention. Columbia Missourian editors Jeanne Abbott and Jake Sherlock and their student journalists adapted my plan to the students they had and the time they had. But I’ll share some details of the thinking with you here, in case it helps in your coverage of events in your community.
For advance coverage, I suggested a map database showing who was attending the convention, asking in advance such information as:
- Name
- Title (given funky titles these days, including mine, I asked whether they might want a separate field for description)
- Organization
- Photo (I said they should encourage something more fun than mugs)
- Video clips
- Years in journalism
- Twitter username
- Number of staff positions lost in the past year
- Percentage of staff positions lost in the past year
- What’s the organization’s best innovation success in the past year?
- What’s the organization’s best watchdog success in the past year?
- How is the editor scrimping on expenses for APME conference?
Again, for big events in your community, consider what kind of interactive database (map or another format) you might develop in advance to present the people and the issues involved in the event. And, of course, you can see from the last five questions, you can gather information for some advance stories this way as well. You could do this with an online survey. The Missouri students were contacting editors in advance, asking for the information (not sure they used my list; they probably came up with a better one).
The students launched their convention blog last week, with some helpful posts about things to do in St. Louis.
I suggested that for major sessions of the conference, they could use up to six journalists at once: One doing liveblog play-by-play, one adding context, links and commentary, one liveblog editor (bloggers post directly and editor cleans up behind them), one visual journalist who will contribute still photographs to the liveblog, one visual journalist doing a summary video story, one director of the live online video, taking the video feed showing on the convention hall screens.
Of course, you could streamline this approach a variety of ways for fewer staff members (and I’m pretty sure they will for most sessions): Just taking the convention feed with no monitoring; liveblogging without editing; combining the visual tasks (shoot a couple quick stills for the liveblog, then working on the video); just one writer. Because the students are also covering the Associated Press Photo Managers convention meeting at the same time, they will certainly need smaller crews to cover concurrent sessions when the two groups aren’t meeting jointly.
Of course, I encouraged strong use of social media. Students will be Twittering throughout the convention as @APME2009 and encouraging APME members who Twitter (not enough do, so we’re hoping this will encourage them) to use the hashtag #APME09. The students have also launched a Facebook page and a Flickr page.
Abbott’s advice to students is great advice for coverage of any event:
Here’s our overarching goal for covering this thing: Be innovative. We’re not going to play by traditional rules. We’re going to be heavy on video, photography and blogging. We’re going to be light on traditional narrative. We’re not going to put everything through 20 rounds of editing – it’s going to be buddy-system editing by everyone. Nobody is going to specialize in just one thing – be ready for some serious backpack journalism.
And most of all: We want to be immediate.
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