Reflections on Liveblog
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Don’t worry, I’m not going to write another 1000 words on liveblogging.
I just wanted to tell you some of the things that have come up while we’ve been running our Moratorium Day, Voting Day and marathon Count Day liveblogs here.
Firstly, we’ve put Blacknight’s machinery under unwarranted stresses. They’ve been fantastically helpful and Cian was heaping praise by the oodle on them when I spoke to him today. The site fell over twice (at least) but they pulled it back up again swiftly. ScribbleLive themselves asked us to switch temporaily to the iframe format (which it turned out we like better anyway) as they were a bit worried about running our bananas cross-posting during the Apple developer conference.
Secondly, the numbers have been stunning. For three days at any given time (day into night) there were about 300 people looking at the ScribbleLive page. At 1.30am last night, it was still hovering around 120. Cian estimates that the number of total views of the ScribbleLive page was probably pushing towards 6 figures, all things considered. We’ll know exactly from now on as one of the changes ScribbleLive has made is to let you integrate it with Google Analytics.
Thirdly, this Liveblog has been-without question-the best platform for news, colour, audio and video for this Election Count. Gene Kerrigan in the Sunday Independent largely based included it in his column on the rolling commentary and updates available here and nowhere else elsewhere. Any number of nuggets of journalism and breaking news have wheeled past our eyes.
To put that in context; the core of Suzy, Alexia, Mark Coughlan and Cian (with some assistance from myself and Fergal) have, with no pay, no resources and no back office support just out-done the entire collected Irish press corps. RTE lagged, the papers didn’t even try. While local radio, and local papers on twitter provided superb in depth coverage of their local areas, only Newstalk, with George Hook’s rolling performance, seemed to be trying to go beyond their comfort zone for the benefit of a national audience.
Perhaps I’ll leave the last word, as seems suitable, to one of the hundreds of Twitter contributors who made the liveblog such a massive and varied event.
@conoro: The first elections where I watched 0 TV coverage, heard 0 radio coverage and read 0 newspaper coverage. 100% ScribbleLive FTW! #LE09 #EU09 http://twitter.com/conoro/statuses/2073826453
And perhaps, as a hint of discussions to come;
http://twitter.com/conoro/statuses/2073757071
Excellent work, well done lads
Not sure about the “out-performed the whole Irish press corps” statement. Maybe for breaking news but for adding comment and depth through interviews from big-name politicians, in that area we didn’t touch the MSM.
However, it’d be fair to say we punched way above our weight in other areas though – especially when you consider we only had two people actually in the count centre – even less than PhantomFM or NearFM.
Interesting to note that everyone I mentioned Irishelection.com to recongised the brand name (excluding Enda Kenny – but FG and the internet have never been bed-mates).
how much spam did you get that needed moderating?
Actual spam was nearly non-existant.
Mostly the moderation consisted of, as Suzy explained in the sticky post at the top, cutting out retweets and some chatter- if there was hard news instead.
joe higgins elected
by BrianGreene via twitter at 6/8/2009 4:29:23 AM5:29 AM
70 watchers at the time
I thought your coverage was damn impressive. Thanks very much.
RTE dropped the ball on this one and even the IT didn’t update nearly enough
A big well done to everyone who kept us all up to date, the coverage was fantastic and second to none. One of the best achievements was seeing information which was hard to get available here, as well as all the colour bits and pieces around the counts. Well done everyone on an amazing job.
Thanks a million to everyone Simon mentions above for helping us all out on the day. I have to say that the liveblog was above and beyond expecation in terms of organising figures – getting the data and posting it quickly. thanks to people who were at count centres and decided to help out off their own bat. It was amazing to see how many people got on board this project.
Major kudos to Suzy for all the moderating work – was great fun to be in HQ on saturday watching a pro in action. Thanks to Alexia and Mark for the huge shifts put in both at blog HQ and at the RDS. The use of qik in particular to bring enormous colour to the coverage was a revelation to me and with a new video iphone coming it can only get better I think!
On the medium itself, I would only seek permalinking and internal search so the information in the liveblog becomes maximally useful to google and to bloggers who are writing longer posts based on teh data. It is a flexible medium and one we will be using again and again.
I was genuinely blown away by the Liveblog for the election and it is no exaggeration to say that it was my sole source of live info about the event. In fact, apart from a few checks on RTE and Irish Times each morning, ScribbleLive+Twitter were my only sources of info at all. And it just worked brilliantly.
Regarding video, people never cease to be amazed when I demo Qik live-streaming to them but they often ask what it can be used for. They won’t be asking that question again.
Well done to the entire team and everyone who contributed over the past few days. I’m convinced we have just witnessed a major turning point in election coverage here and that this will be mainstream when the next elections come around. I said it on Twitter and I’ll repeat it here, RTE should be very afraid.
Congratulations and a word of caution.
You approve of Conor O’Neill’s Tweet, claiming that “a few amateurs” have made RTE “redundant for all future election coverage”.
Quite properly proud of the achievement, but not even close to being true.
You say my Indo piece was “largely based on the rolling commentary and updates available here and nowhere else”.
I was assigned to write a piece giving a flavour of the media coverage of the results, with a deadline at 4pm, updated at 7pm. In short, a bog standard colour piece. This meant constant channel-hopping, mixed with sampling the internet coverage. I believed that such a piece had to reference blogging and Twitter. The 7pm update is at least 80% descriptive of the TV and radio coverage.
I skimmed over a range of Twittering and blogging. By accident, hopping from one thing to another, I came across the live blogging by Suzy, Alexia, Mark Coughlan and Cian etc. And others. Terrific stuff. Original work, relentless, full of energy and commitment. I used, with credit, a Tweet from Mark, about Conor Lenihan.
When I was finished working, for my personal information I looked up Suzy, Alexia etc occasionally during the evening – for the bigger, more coherent picture, I stuck with RTE.
A constant flow of raw information has its uses. Without coherence – which is, I suppose, another word for editing and context – it can mislead or frustrate. On various new media, a lot of the information was passed on from one Twitterer to another, and another, and another, so it was hard to tell what the original source was. Some new media breathlessly passed on information – uncredited – that I’d just heard on RTE. This freeflowing aspect is one of the strengths – and potential weaknesses – of the technology.
Some of the commentary was insightful, some was off the wall. A bit like the MSM.
The technology will develop, it’s here to stay. The MSM hasn’t yet got a handle on how best to use it. Nor – despite the best of intentions and obviously admirable achievements – have the amateurs. It’s a work in progress and I – and I suspect most of us – haven’t the foggiest idea where it’s going.
Regards.
Hi Gene,
Thanks for coming by and commenting.
I was looking to be provocative in my above piece. In doing so, I overstated your use of the liveblog- I entirely accept your recharacterisation.
I thought your use of Mark’s tweet and assessment of the position of the Liveblog was entirely positive, and didn’t intend to suggest anything else by referring to it.
The primary weakness of the Liveblog format (like other rolling news media) is that the news appears and then vanishes down the page. Unless you’re monitoring it all the time (which some of us were) you might miss something useful.
But it also acted an instant source of much wanted hard facts from the actual count centres.
To give an example, RTE were still quoting exit poll numbers from the Dublin Euro election a day after people on the liveblog had the tally numbers to the 3rd count.
Cian, in his comment above, acknowledged- as I do- that the format has strengths and weaknesses.
All that notwithstanding, if you wanted the earliest, best informed and most reliable information on what what happening in this count there was no better source than the Liveblog.
Given the disparity of resources between IrishElection and any news source with a salaried staff I’m immensly proud of the collective achievement.
Given your openness to Twitter and these other new media which are struggling to find their shape, I hope we’ll be able to add you as a contributor next time.
After all, if you were hopping from channel to channel all evening, you were just our sort of person.
A quick point…
We’re not “a few amateurs”. Just because we were not being paid by Irishelection.com at the weekend does not make us amateurs. Also note: being an online-only free-to-consume product doesn’t make the writers amateurs automatically.
Myself and Cian both work full-time for established media outlets at present (though I’ll be back to college in a few weeks) while Suzy has worked in the media in the past. “A few amateurs” implies that our work is somehow lesser than An. Others…
Gene…
I’d like to say that many of the comments on the liveblog were beyond the control of Irish Election.com. We encouraged people to use the hashtag #le09 but we didn’t consider them a “contributor” because they did use it, if they didn’t credit – that’s their prerogative. Personally, I was using the liveblog as a tip-line, not a definitive source, everything I wrote that came from tips from the liveblog was doubled-sourced by party press officers in the RDS. In fact, even when TV3 reported figures on the first-prefs in the Dublin Euros I checked them before confirming them to be accurate and posting (Cian did credit TV3 also – oddly enough the parties confirmed TV3’s figures to me, then the figures turned out to be wrong… but that’s another story).
To all commenters…
Yes, the liveblog was a great source, almost like a national newswire minus the copy, but it, even in combination with analysis/reports from Cian, colour/analysis/reports/images from myself and video from Alexia, not to mention Suzy, Simon and Fergal did not make RTÉ or Newstalk or The Irish Times redundant.
We punched way above our weight and I’m proud of that – for a few people with a few laptops, a few phones and a camera or two, we did great. But, redundant – nah, we just worked our arse off and knew how to get information to our reporters and readers quicker. We had a stunningly efficient editorial process and, as Gene Kerrigan said, a relentless drive to get content posted first – that, in addition to understaning how to filter the online information, was the secret to our success. But remember, we could do that because we didn’t have to concern ourselves with many things that mainstream outlets had to consider.
I’m sure as online coverage becomes more important that the way elections are covered will change – we’re probably just a year or two ahead of the curve. Once RTÉ note that they are competing with everyone not just TV3, The Irish Times start to consider Newstalk a direct competitor, and vice versa, I think we’ll see a big jump in the quality of online coverage. That will be to the benefit of every media consumer interested in the subject being covered.
Yes the new media coverage needs more coherence, rolling analysis and depth. That, as opposed to breaking news – requires investment – monetary investment. Just like online immediacy and breaking news coverage from newspapers needs investment. Maybe Irish Election will get some investment, maybe at the next general election we’ll partner with a mainstream media outlet for the election period or something – we’d cover breaking news online, they’d have the experienced journos to call the big names into the interview booth, maybe not.
In the meantime, we won’t be making anyone redundant. We’ll keep punching way above our weight and developing a name for the site – but we won’t be able to provide context comparable to the mainstream outlets unless we go beyond the “time investment alone” model that we currently operate on.
At least in my own humble opinion.
Hopefully people will continue this – it’ll make an interesting discussion.
I think we all learned a few things even over the course of the last few days. For example, next time there should be a rule that if a tweet is already hashtagged, there’s no need to RT it. Also, moderations skills improved over the course of the count. A comment appeared yesterday evening to the effect that Sinnott had taken the last seat in South. As it came from someone who’s name hadn’t been prominent amonst contributors, and wasn’t backed up by anyone else, I figured it was michief, and deleted it immediately. Had I left it on the blog there might have been a rash of comments in it’s wake, and the echo chamber effect Gene mentions.
This kind of thing will evolve over time. But if you compare the Local and Euro liveblog with the US Election one from last year, its clear that things are coming on in leaps and bounds. With good moderation and a good source in every count, a liveblog of the next election could be authoritative as well as just fast-reacting
I spent much of my weekend hanging on the updates on the live blog. Stranded in the US midwest, it was a lifeline. While I’d usually spend a count weekend hanging around count centres, or nearby bars, threshing out the detail of the developments with fellow junkies, this was a good replacement.
At the same time, it was also important to have RTE.ie’s up to date figures for count results across the country. This was comprehensive information that a live-blog won’t provide. Also, as is noted, the live-blog gives a good sense of the current feeling of the crowd, but the short-form is at the cost of the analysis you might get occasionally elsewhere. I’m also coming into this as someone who, as a community radio activist, is interested in how the crowd-sourcing potential of the internet can be used to the advantage of existing alternative and volunteer media structures.
I’m reminded of a description from elsewhere of radio’s traditional role as a curator of content. That was originally intended in the context of music, but it also applies to the highlighting of insightful and thoughtful analysis. The features column of the site could play a role in pulling out such long-form thoughtful analysis, and some of this was done, but there’s potential for more. There’s also the possibility of more formal arrangements between the site, which provides a good tool for drawing in content, and organizations with other strengths (be it organized volunteer pools, audio/video equipment and expertise, or skills at providing the ‘curating’ role).
I’d also note that I really appreciated the Qik content from Alexia, but it suffers from a shortcoming: the sound quality, particularly when retransmitting the live announcement of the count results, was indistinct, as a result of limitations in the hardware (and because it was pulling audio indirectly through the speakers, not from a mic on the returning officer’s podium). On some occasions I was unable to make out the figures being called, so if there was anyone with an audio feed direct from the podium that they could make available online (and point to from the live-blog) that would have been helpful.
May I suggest the following as possible spaces for development of this type of activity:
1 Structured space for uploading of tally and count results from individual count centres. Some form of moderation may be useful here – it may be helpful to solicit individuals in advance, so it’s known where there could/will be gaps. With some planning the information available could be much more useful than that provided at present by RTE (who only included elect/elim figures for candidates in the locals, not the count-by-count changes).
2 Encourage creation of various front-ends for presentation and manipulation of this data.
3 Reach out to/partner with smaller media outlets, such as community radio stations, which are likely to have individuals on the ground in different venues, as well as other important resources (see below) but cannot hope to compete with RTE or similar by themselves.
4 Go a step beyond cell phone audio/video for ‘official’ results. Get patched into the audio from the podium. Partnerships with community radio stations could help here.
5 Conduct sit-down interviews with candidates and others. There’s a lot of down-time at counts, so lots of time to get reflective commentary from thoughtful individuals.
I’d also encourage that content be made available in formats that encourage ‘remixing’ by others. In particular, I can imagine interview and audio/video highlights being pulled together into compendium pieces, or more playing around with the numerical data – I’m reminded of that cute graphical representation of the transfer process.
Over all though – thanks to everyone who made this possible. A great resource. [And some great results to follow too!]
I want it to be borne in mind when I say what I’m going to say – I was invovled in an election count and nothing else on the Saturday. It could easily be that I missed seeing people doing web coverage.
I was based in the count centre in Fingal – and there was no sign of online activity there – maybe next time, one person could be dispatched to the rest of county Dublin centres – and perhaps to a couple of the other major count centres around the country? It would really add to what seems to have been great coverage.
We don’t really have people to dispatch, Tom. People go where they want to go and if they fancy sending in info to the liveblog, fantastic. Considering we’re not paying anyone, it’d be a bit cheeky to ask.
That said, it would have been great to have someone in every count centre. Maybe next time you can text in info from where ever you are? We’d be more than happy to add it to the stream.
PS I was talking to Howard Mahony on Friday, I hear the Fingal Count Centre doesnt even have seats, let alone Wifi/broadband!
We did ask people who were going to counts to let us know and we would take info from them in whatever way they wanted to. I know I for one was very aware that there would be wifi problems at various count centres and we offered to phone people or have a phone number available. I got info from people in counts in Wicklow and Cork amongst others using phone contacts.
I spent the days before the count contacting other bloggers/tweeters I knew were going to the count or who contacted me after we posted asking how they could help and I suggested ways that they could contribute.
Which brings me to my main response to this post lads. The live blog was a tiny part of the online coverage of the elections. Twitter was huge and we harnessed it into the liveblog – the local radio and newspapers who reported on counts by using twitter were a revelation to me on the day as I was searching twitter. I subbed them into the blog. The tag we let people know about was only a small part of the picture. During the day other people found us and joined in and we cound tweeters and bloggers that we never knew existed.
And back to the liveblog not being the main game notion – it was the place to gather info from other bloggers and tweeters and send people back out again to other blogs to get their information – whether it was to Limerickblogger.ie or corkpolitics.ie or info we got from Google talk or a Twitter DM or to Flickr or electionsireland.org or even to this blog. The liveblog also served as a place to point people to places to find out info on their count of interest.
The liveblog as jumping point (Curation central!) came into it’s own particularly when the MSM closed up for night or even large parts of the day on Sunday. Counts and eliminations continued and we also got the blogger created content in the forms of video and blogposts we could point people to. Alexia in particular demonstrated the possibilities for user created content by walking quickly round the RDS qiking counts of interest and the arrivals and pressers of candidates and Government ministers who dropped in and jumping on interview opportunities as they arose.
There are lots of things I would do to change and improve what we did and planning for GE09/10 has begun. 43 counts to be covered and lots of subplots inbetween. For GE07 hardly anyone used twitter – now it’s used by lots of people and we have iphones and smart phones. For #le09 we had twitter and Qik . Who knows what tools we’ll have available to us next time. I know I’ll be looking to restrict and redirect chatter/commentary even further from people watching – we worked as hard as we could on that – we every had spam comments left claiming poll topping performances from those who did not keep their seat. I caught that and many more in over 30 hours online on Saturday and Sunday.
I’m also wondering can you plan too much for something… and if the thing about covering the count was that it happened with a little bit of planning but we took what we got and did what we did with the data found and efforts that were there. We also don’t need to duplicate what exists already or compete to get there first – it’s the curating and the support of what isn’t there and what can be that is special about the online medium for me.
why try to cut down on comment and conversation, and block what this tech was made for, why give you self so work much to pre-mod every comment? praising yourself for work that might simply have been unnecessary. you and the users can catch or correct falsehoods as you go, don’t try to be definitive when thats not going to happen.
did the liveblog.ie and irishelection.com split the brand and the info?
ps fingal had webcam stream but little coverage otherwise, near fm that supposed to cover dublin north east only covered dublin council.
The liveblog is moderated for a number of reasons – one being defamation law as it was embedded on a number of websites including liveblog.ie, irishelection.com and tuppenceworth.ie. Also there was agreement amongst the moderators to keep the chattter/discussions to a minimum – we didn’t always succeed there! But that is another reason for premodding and we informed everyone of the priority for info and links to other sources and diverted chat elsewhere.
Steve White,
For an example of what happens to a mass traffic liveblog without strong moderation see the collapse into incoherance of the US election liveblog from last year.
http://www.scribblelive.com/Event/US_Election_Night_2008?Page=48
That was a great learning moment for us.
isn’t the rule especially with this betfair fourm ruilling that if you take down things as soon as you see them or are notified of them later by a complainant then you not immediately liable?
does liveblog allow you to approve all of one users post while premodding others?
its was 3:30 then at similar time to 5am when counts were called here do you want to stay up premodding at that time?
Liveblog
One aspect of the elections that was rather badly covered pretty much everywhere was the actual count results beyond the 1st count particular on the Saturday for the locals. I was very badly disappointed by RTe in that they gave the 1st count results and then nothing after that, just ticking who was ended up being elected. And it’s not like they didn’t have the template to do it as they did give each count result for the Euros, so they simply chose not to do it. If it was a matter of having people to punch in the numbers the spreadsheets were available at each of the count centres and the content could easily have pasted into whatever source they were using for the site. It’s simply a matter of linking up the information. A non-trivial undertaking I will admit but doable.
The folks at electionsireland were doing nearly as well in terms of the count and they’re not staffed as Rte is. Fact is that in some ways the duplication across the various media outlets meant that more work ended up producing less. Perhaps next time we should seek to have a collective MiCount and get each of the media outfits to feed off that and contribute some smallish sum that could buy people a few pints.
I was primarily on p.ie for the day and while I had attempted in advance to get people to tag threads in order that they would be easier to people find I pretty well knew it was a forlorn hope that they would do so. It didn’t work and people all gravitated to lumping stuff into the one place. It was in the words of a mate of mine a frakking zoo.
I would agree that if you not following the liveblog 100% that stuff can zip past you and be gone. The marking of some stuff as sticky was useful, but too much of that and the live aspect disappears. But I also think there was a lack of extrapolating going on, which for the Sinnott count was better done on p.ie with some people who understood the likely extent of non-transferable votes and so more. I lost count of the number of people who were insisting via twitter and the liveblog that Ferris would be elected because of the Kerry votes despite the fact that Kelly’s surplus was coming from Colm Burke and so too would the distributed surplus. A lot of the content for the live blog originated from twitter and the 140 character limit really hurt that for factual info.
The various local authorities took varying approaches and had varying degrees of follow-through and success. Kerry count council had a live video feed from the count centres but the Killarney count centre said at 9.40pm that they would be announcing the results of the 1st count in about 20 minutes at 10pm and it ended up closer to 11pm. They also promised full details of each count as they happened but didn’t post them until they were all done. Limerick City council too posted PDFs of the counts but again this was up later only the following day. And they skipped nearly ten counts!