Think C-Span is dry? Their on-line coverage of the political conventions is anything but
If you haven’t checked out what C-Span is doing with the Democratic Convention,
you’re missing some exciting journalism.
The convention hub includes not only the videos you’d
expect, but also blogs from nearly every state and Twitter feeds from just about
everybody on the convention floor.
Project manager Leslie
Bradshaw of New Media Strategies
explains the concept and how it’s different from what other news media outlets:
“While some news organizations
will be promoting their own content and looking to partner with online giants,
C-SPAN is taking it to the people …
“That’s right folks, we are
linking to state bloggers, national bloggers, news-affiliate-bloggers, Utterz users, Qik'ers,
Twitter'ers … as long as we can get our hands
on the content and it is relevant to the conventions at hand, we will work to
feature it. Think about the kind of implications this has from both an
efficiency-of-information-market as well as a sociological perspective — folks
who may have never been interested in the conventions but who love technology
can be turned on to one through the other.”
C-Span is providing a universe of different voices, some
professional journalists, others citizen journalists, reporting through a
variety of media.
Follow Leslie on
Twitter to look behind the scenes of this innovative coverage. They’ll be doing the same for the Republic National Convention next week.
While you’re at it, also check out DNC Journalists on Twitter, an
aggregation of professional “tweeters” compiled by Steve Myers at
Poynter.
Forget, just for a
bit, this is a major convention with a press corps of 10,000 journalists. There
are some great ideas here newsrooms could adopt for their own local “major
events.”