Interactive Journalism II

Our interactive project spanned 3 boroughs and 6 different events, with 2 producers, 2 researchers and 6 reporters.

When the class came up with the idea to connect these little cultural festivals and block parties into one big cover it live party, I hoped it would work out, but couldn’t envision it going smoothly. Still we forged ahead.

I was a producer along with Gosia, and from the first day we managed a google spreadsheet and doc that everyone could access. That worked well, along with Gosia sending out deadlines for emailing pre-produced content. I created an interactive map with our locations and other festivals going on in the area to help with promotion and emailed several local news orgs/bloggers in areas we were covering.

Our last meeting was a real work-horse day, really nailing down details and how we were communicating to key reporters to start streaming. It was slightly complex because we’d be communicating with reporters on the phones they were also using to stream with. But it ended up working – 15 minutes before streaming time, I’d text them, 5 minutes before streaming time, they got one more text – they start streaming withing 2 or 3 minutes with an understanding that they’d be live in 5 minutes.We had some fail-safes also – copying the embed codes for video-streams, the coverit live module, back-ups in case phones weren’t working., etc.

Day of, first thing Gosia did was set up a screen to see everyone’s stream – brilliant. Also we had 1 call sheet with numbers and times each person would start. I edited a tease with stand-ups the reporters sent in. That was our first and only major snag aside from one non-working phone because managing the download of the teases was more complex than I thought. I would encourage more time for things like that (we had about an hour or so), and testing beforehand. During the event I was tweeting, linking, commenting, communicating with reporters. As we discussed in class, we could just think more about the viewer experience – at times we may have given too much to look at and there was never enough promotion…facebook and twitter only go so far.

But in all, I think it worked brilliantly. Proud moment. Unprecceeddeennnttteddd…

Here is Frank Kaufman the featured artist at the LIC Art Open.

The cover it live experience was such a great opportunity to use technology to tell stories LIVE! Originally I had my doubts that everything would go smoothly but I was surprised to see how great it turned out. Everyone worked together and I must say we had great producers to guide us and organize all of our material. I was covering the Long Island City Art Open featuring Fran Kaufman, the famous jazz photographer. THere were great visuals and there were so many people who agreed to do interviews. The issue for me was my audio was not working and I did not get the message until after I went live. I thought I had this great video with all my interviews lined up with great piano music in the background but unfortunately all the beautiful noise was muted. I think next time I would use my flip cam and edit a few videos and send in just in case the audio is not working so I have something to work with. I liked the idea of the photo slide shows. I thought Debra’s looked great. Overall I was very pleased with the outcome of the cover it live event. I think for me I will test out the materials more before I go out in the field just to make sure everything is working and make sure I have a plan B just in case something goes wrong. I definitely want to do something like this again, and next time I feel a lot more prepared.