This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: August 26, 2008 - Today, a look at the two Denver papers and how they're covering the convention through blogging and multimedia.
Rocky Mountain News
The Rocky Mountain News has a cleanly designed DNC page with a dedicated menu, news ticker and a chronological listing of stories. Then there are the modules for nearly everything you'd care to read: One is a widget that tracks the reporters' Twitter updates, another provides video and photo galleries, a third provides a calendar of events with a way for users to submit their own. There's even a simple box on the page for a user to submit a news tip directly to the staff.
I count six blogs the Rocky Mountain News has running. One, "Green Watch at the DNC" (a look at environmental aspects of the convention), has no entries as of Tuesday morning. Other than that, the blogs are:
Rocky Talk Live, a long-running blog that is focusing on the convention for now. Lots of video.
Life of a DNC delegate, where a News reporter follows a Pennsylvania delegate who is a Clinton supporter.
DNC as theater, whose description is "Rocky Mountain News theater critic Lisa Bornstein shares her take on the most scripted event in politics". Interesting concept there.
Convention-al Wisdom (yuk yuk yuk), which is your typical "event blog" -- a comprehensive look. Doesn't mean it's boring: Some of the interesting recent posts are "Who isn't speaking at the DNC", and a look at "Oxygen Plus", a company that is at the convention selling canisters of oxygen for, as the blog says, "the flatlanders having trouble cat[c]hing their breath in the Mile High City".
And finally, the Rocky Truth Patrol. This is a wonderful concept for a blog: Each entry is a claim made by somebody at or about the convention (examples: "New York Delegates Warned Not to Imbibe in Denver", "The Republican National Committee is hosting a happy hour for Hillary Clinton"), and the entry goes on to either confirm or debunk the claim, with a handy gauge showing "Just wrong", "Shaky", or "Rock-solid" (the two examples? Rock-solid).
The the menu across the top offers access to several (pardon the pun) conventional pages dedicated to the DNC: a Multimedia page, with videos and photos from both inside and outside the convention; an Opinion page with editorials, columnists, guest contributors, blogs, letters to the editor and editorial cartoons; a guide to Denver, including a large interactive map with restaurants, bars and attractions as well as an event calendar; and a Live Video page with live streaming video of the convention floor, as well as archived video of speeches.
Denver Post
The Denver Post's coverage is split between two locations, which is a little confusing.
If you visit the Denver Post's home page and click the "Denver '08" item in the top menu, you find a DNC multimedia coverage page which is simple and offers fewer options at first glance than the Rocky Mountain News'. It has a dedicated menu as well, but it is mostly multimedia. What there is, however, is great: You get a searchable calendar, several photo galleries with a way to upload your own photos, live web cams, live video from the convention floor, and three very slick multimedia presentations. The multimeda projects are timeline of the last 100 years of the party and a look at how the convention came to be in Denver. The Post also offers the "DNC Taxi Game", wherein you drive a taxi and deliver delegates to Invesco Field in time for Obama's speech. Nice concept, but clunky execution.
The main place to find DNC coverage on the Post's site is their Politics West section. It has top stories, an events map, breaking news, multimedia, all the standard stuff. But there are differences here. Along the left side, the DNC news is broken up into four topic areas: Public Safety, Celebrities and Parties, Logistics and Business, six headlines from each are displayed. There's also a section with audio news reports, national headlines from Politico.com, and once again, blogs are featured:
The Campus Campaign features a blog by and about the college vote -- an interesting perspective frequently ignored.
The Delegate Derby is a group of delegates blogging about their experiences, and will apparently be continued throughout the Republican convention as well.
Blogging Dem Blogs takes a look at other bloggers and media and what they're saying about the convention.
The blogs are rounded up by Ostrow off the Record by Joanne Ostrow, the Post's entertainment critic, and the long-running Gang of Four blog, by John Andrews, Ross Kaminsky, David Sirota and Nancy Watzman with other guests.
The Big Picture
As I was writing this, Poynter.org's Jim Romanesko popped up in my RSS reader with a Wall Street Journal article about the local newspapers' coverage of the conventions.
Being in the Wall Street Journal, the story focuses mainly on the money aspect: In these times of economic hardship for newspapers, the convention cities' papers are taking a big financial risk in investing money in their coverage. However, the paper also passes along this tidbit: "The Denver Post bought dozens of staffers BlackBerrys so they can update the Web site from the convention floor. The Rocky Mountain News has been training staffers how to take digital photos with cellphones and use the instant-messaging service Twitter for quick updates during the convention."
