PORTFOLIO
EDUCATION
THOUGHTS • An experiment in live coverage
mail@juliealbertson.com
The Coachella Music & Arts Festival has become a huge deal in the music world over the past few years and it's right in our backyard so of course we wanted to make sure we owned the coverage.
We decided to go live.
Now most of you can't truly appreciate the challenge -- and humor -- of that undertaking until I point out that we are a thrifty Gannett paper, with equipment so vintage our print staff reported back that the big kids in the press tent (Rolling Stone, NY Times, you know who you are...) were LAUGHING at us. It's all cool though...
Where was I? Oh right, we decided to go live. Sure we could just do a blog from the scene -- which we did -- but we wanted more. More live, more hip, something with more power to draw an audience... we needed images.
I'd been moblogging since I finally broke down and bought a camera phone in January so I had this idea that it would be fun to bring that concept of "sure the photo quality is sub-par but oh how the instant gratification makes up for it" into the sometimes too stodgy mainstream newspaper world.
Textamerica founder Chris Hoar graciously agreed to let us use their *kickass* free service so after an hour of monkeying with the stylesheet for one of their templates and incorporating it into our site we were up and running.
The Textamerica interface worked brilliantly. Seamlessly. We were able to have images from the concert updated live on our home page (and several section fronts) using the service's "most recent image" functionality -- which can still be viewed on our Coachella page.
Unfortunately we ran into a fairly major glitch on day two of the festival. As random bad luck would have it, T-Mobile's SMTP gateway took a dive for most of the day. No e-mails in or out. I've been using T-Mobile messaging for years and have never seen this happen so this was not only unexpected but almost unforeseeable. And entirely frustrating. The worst part is that there wasn't really anything I could do about it from the scene. Actually the worst part is that my phone still said the messages were going through so I deleted as I went (the phone only has so much memory after all) and now those images are forever lost in cyberspace.
That unavoidable mishap aside, the Coachella moblog experiment was a success. It and the text blog together generated very positive reader response, bringing a large weekend audience to the site, and played a major role in propelling a traffic spike that obliterated the previous year's jump in event traffic. And those big numbers were sustained for nearly a full week.
Lessons learned:
In the end, our live coverage was impeded only by...
... the limits of our technology: The text blog would have been updated more frequently except that the wireless signal dropped at times and could only be accessed from part of the venue but the biggest problem was that my 3-year-old Jornada only has so much battery life.
... the limits of cellular technology: Beyond the T-Mobile foul-up, cell access at the festival is very hit or miss late in the day as the full 50,000-plus crowd fills into the grounds (each person armed with a mobile of his/her own). Cell towers in that end of the valley are sparsely distributed as it is and you've never seen so many people on their phones all at once. Right before or after the more popular groups perform, forget about it. Everyone is calling someone to meet up or talk about the band they just saw.
... lack of manpower: I had to leave the concert early both nights to go back to the office and take care of the daily copy.
... lack of resources: I was using my own gadgets. It was just Julie @ Coachella because I was the only one with a camera phone or wireless handheld (well that and we only had one press pass for online).
... last minute planning: Talk about a deadline mentality. Our exceptional (if I do say so myself ;) Coachella coverage both online and in print was a miracle of elements coming together -- and a lot of hard work at crunch time. Print planning started late and we couldn't confirm that we'd even have a press pass for online until a few days before the fest. It turns out if we'd been more organized I would have been able to find our features editor and IT director onsite in the press tent (which, I found out the hard way, event staff will swear up and down doesn't exist but it's inside the VIP tent) and been able to plug in and recharge.
... lack of promotion: Another big downfall of everything coming together at the final hour was that we were unable to promo our online coverage until the day of the festival. Our numbers were huge, but we'll never know what could have been if we'd been pushing the promo for a week in print, online and possibly even on air thanks to our local TV partnership with CBS2.
All things to think about when we try to out-do ourselves next year. :)
May 16, 2004