Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Digital-first coverage of the governor's visit

 The Orion's coverage of Gov. Jerry Brown's appearance on campus yesterday was textbook digital-first journalism, and I'm guessing the effort will continue with tomorrow's print edition of the paper.

Remember the news diamond I wrote about last week? The Orion staff followed it to a T. Here's what happened...

Alert
On Thursday, Editor-in Chief Kacey Gardner tweeted that a visit was in the wind and invited readers to follow theorion_news on Twitter.
The next day, theorion_news confirmed time and place: Monday outside the Student Services Center.
As the event got under way, Paul Smeltzer, Quinn Western, Pedro Quintana, Lauren Beaven and Jake Martin (some of them doing an assignment for their Internet Newspapers and Magazine class) started posting details.
The coverage included descriptions of the preliminaries and Brown surrogates, quotations from the governor's speech and photos from the event, all posted in real time.

Draft
Within an hour after Brown packed his speech and left the podium, Quinn Western posted a story on theorion.com that was accompanied by a Frank Rebelo photo. 

Article/Package
This morning's webcast included a vo/sot of the governor's appearance with a clip from the speech itself.
It's a good guess that a story about the speech, with a fuller explanation of what Prop 30 will or won't do for student pocketbooks, will appear in Wednesday's paper.

Analysis/Reflection
If the opinion staff stays true to form, an opinion piece written off news of the visit will grace the opinion pages on Wednesday.

More to come?
I'll be interested to see if readers respond to the coverage. Students have a lot at stake with Prop 30, potentially including money back on tuition, but the campus get-out-the-vote effort and campaigning for the ballot measure have been sparse. We'll have to see if increased visibility because of coverage in The Orion generates some heat.

The paper, to this point at least, did a great job covering the governor's campaign visit.

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