I finished my live coverage of the gay pride parade on June 26. It was such an amazing experience as a huge crowd of two million people gathered to celebrate the historic signing of the same sex marriage law in New York. Just two days earlier, the state of New York passed the historic legislation to become the sixth and the most populous state to allow same sex marriage.
My post about the event on Facebook and Tweeter (snapshots below) received positive reactions. In addition to this, I also sent emails to CUNY students and some friends to call for their tuning in. One day earlier I covered with pictures of the Dyke Parade as a warming up to the event (I actually used some pictures from the Dyke parade to illustrate the emotions after the historic legislation). Some still images of the Gay Parade can be seen at the end of this post.
I put my headline as “Live Covering of NY’s Gay Pride Parade” and it seemed that many searchers caught it up. I had constantly 20-25 people logged in to follow my live feeds and pictures of the event. Some were from far away place like Puerto Rico, Chicago and Boston also followed the feeds and joined the discussion. Some gave me kudos for the work.
Despite all these positive reactions, I must admit that working alone when live reporting such event is a huge challenge when you tried to juggle between taking pictures, downloading it, uploading while keeping the feeds alive. I came early around 10:00 a.m. – two hours before the march – to grab a decent spot and try to talk to people for comments on the new same-sex marriage laws. These interviews and early research on the latest developments after the historic Friday night helped me out a lot during the coverage as I had more time to multi-task during the march. Later on I found the hash of the parade so I also integrated some of the feeds into my Live Reporting. The integration did help for the feeds but in retrospect, I think I’d better filter the Tweets feeds more. My covering also ended a little bit abruptly after around 3 hrs reporting as the battery for my Mac is out. I brought an extra laptop as cover-up but somehow that one didn’t connect to the Hotspot that I brought along (it worked when I tried at home). I told people of my changing the laptop though.
I learn a lot from reporting live with this assignment. I feel more confident doing the live reporting now. If I have more people around, maybe some live streaming will help even more as many people logged in and ask about live video.
Here follows are some still pictures of the parade.