Multi-platform lessons learned

When a big story breaks, the challenge these days is not only to get the story right and get it fast but also to get it to every possible audience. Elections give newsrooms a rare opportunity to plan for breaking news, so it’s a great time to figure out what works and what doesn’t.

At the PBS News Hour, election night this year was a good test of their three screen strategy, with producers feeding TV, mobile and the Web, including social media. Online news and planning editor Dave Gustafson shared some lessons learned in a post at MediaShift, among them the value of promotion and live news on Facebook.

The NewsHour bought two days’ worth of ads on the Facebook pages of some political campaigns and saw its own Facebook fan group grow by more than 7 percent. On election night, the program embedded a live Ustream video stream into its Facebook page.

We were blown away by the breaking news engagement we got. It has us reconsidering that strategy to post more breaking news content for our Facebook audience.

Another lesson: Google Docs works much better than it used to as a collaborative platform.

On election night, more than a dozen NewsHour staffers worked in the same text document in real-time — filing reports from the field and transcribing quotes from NewsHour analysts and notable guests on other networks. In a different spreadsheet, staff kept track of which races were called by other news organizations and when. We also used the embedded chat feature in Google Docs to communicate while editing and adding information.

One last lesson came too late to do the NewsHour any good, but it’s a useful caution to the rest of us. When you end a live blog event on Cover it Live, apparently, the order of entries flips so the oldest one is on top. “At 3 a.m., we suddenly had news from 5:45 p.m. at the top of our homepage,” Gustafson writes. That hadn’t happened in rehearsals because they simply paused rather than ending the live blog. Lesson learned!

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