Build those breaking news Web pages and they will come
Folks at The Rockford Register-Star are beaming today at the overwhelming response to their hard work following a powerful storms there Monday.
The Register-Star’s special web report received more than a half-million page views Tuesday. By comparison, Rockford averages 130,000-150,000 page views daily.
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A man searches a cornfield across from his home for his belongings Tuesday. Photo by Alan Leon of the Register-Star.
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Of those, 278,425 were of multimedia. Tuesday’s photo galleries generated 100,000 page views. The gallery of reader-submitted photos gathered 88,000 page views.
I’ve had a chance to look at only a small part of the presentations there. Looks like they’ve done a wonderful job.
Congratulations to AME Chris Soprych, editor Linda Grist Cunningham and all the crew in Rockford for giving your readers what they hunger for.
January 9th, 2008 at 7:25 pm
Wow! All that video and those photo galleries and the Google map. Tons of information there for readers.
January 9th, 2008 at 7:34 pm
Brilliant report - a stellar example of how today’s Web multimedia language is not really about using Flash, after all. More about using the right digital journalism story components in real time. Would like to see thumbnails for videos instead of text links. Love the mashup map. Love the knockout effort of the staff reports and how smartly they crafted in reader reports.
b-r-a-v-o
More papers ought to be doing this type of web multimedia everyday rather than thinking of multimedia as documentaries that only impresses other journalists and overwrought Flash projects that only impress coders.
Then when a big event strikes - you ramp up the reporting like seen here.
Book mark this page. Now.
January 9th, 2008 at 8:57 pm
What Rob said is really important. You really have to use the tools and the talent available to cover the story, Flash would have been nice, but we lack the expertise. We can up with some work arounds and pushed forward on shooting and editing videos, Google maps etc.
Check out the video on the evacuation of the newsroom.
Part one: Winter tornado surprises Boone County (01/08/08)
It was a great first day for Billy Kulpa. His breaking news video is the top video
Edwards Apple Orchard owners coping with tornado damage (01/07/08)
BTW- Check out what we did do with Flash on the 40th anniversary of a tornado that struck Belvidere, about 10 miles south. An interesting note– we did this project in ten days during an election week. Its multimedia so you’ll need sound.
http://www.e-rockford.com/special_sections/deploy/index.html
January 11th, 2008 at 11:48 am
Don’t lose site of the other truth here: NOTHING moves local web traffic like Significant Weather.
Great job by Rockford in jumping on it.