The Liverpool Post and Echo attracted more than 9,000 visitors to their live blog coverage of the four-day Tall Ships Race 2008 last weekend, the latest in a string of live blogs from the papers.
The morning and evening Trinity Mirror titles joined forces from Friday morning to yesterday afternoon to give readers minute-by-minute text updates with photos and video.
The Post and Echo team use free blogging service CoverItLive to allow reporters to contribute stories remotely, on everything from the progress of the race to weather and traffic reports.
Links to official webcams gave live views of the ships setting sale. Reporters used microblogging site Twitter to give instant 140 character updates and sound files via the Utterz website. Several readers sent in their own text and pictures from the event and a five-strong team of volunteers staffed the blog, answering readers’ queries, running polls and uploading content.
Steve Harrison, acting assistant editor (digital) for the Daily Post and Echo, said: ‘By the end of the event we had around a dozen videos uploaded, from our own reporters and from sourcing posts on YouTube, scores of photos, taken by our own photographers and by members of the Daily Post’s Flickr group, and lots of comments, debate – even a poem. We were very pleased with its success.’
By yesterday afternoon the blog had attracted more than 17,000 page impressions. It will remain on the site as a permanent archive.
In May the two papers live-blogged the Queen’s visit to Liverpool and last month they gave the same treatment to Paul McCartney’s gig at Liverpool FC’s Anfield stadium.
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