As readers seem to expect more and more live news coverage, a Toronto startup called ScribbleLive has been developing a fast, collaborative way for news organizations to keep up. Cofounder and chief executive Michael De Monte said the latest version of the service, which launched today, lays the groundwork for what he’s hoping will be a new kind of news article.
The Next Web had a great article today about how news organizations used ScribbleLive to cover the G20 and some of our new features. Our mobile features (apps, voicemail, SMS) are real game-changers when it comes to how reporters can report the news in real-time.
The reason that we’re talking about ScribbleLive today is two-fold. First off, it’s an impressive platform. It truly does what no other single solution has been able to do. The second reason is that this is a re-launching, of sorts, and ScribbleLive is announcing a few features that are going to be huge.
- BlackBerry application
- SSL protection for incoming transmission from iPhone and BlackBerry
- Twitter importing with advanced filters for links, length, etc.
- Syndication across multiple properties
The greatest part? It does all of this while still playing nicely with other CMS platforms.
I could literally go on for hours telling you about the features of ScribbleLive and how important it is for news reporting sites, but the best bet is to give it a look for yourself. The people behind ScribbleLive are passionate, and that passion shines through in their product.
(quote via TNW)
We met this week with Tom Foremski from Silicon Valley Watcher. He took some great notes from the meeting he’s published on his blog.
The company offers a very interesting media technology called ScribbleLive, which is a real-time newsroom allowing publishers to rapidly organize and publish text, audio, and video content as it happens.
Several large media companies are using it, such as Thomson Reuters, and Rogers (also an investor). Also, Greenpeace uses the technology.
TORONTO, Sept. 30 /CNW/ – ScribbleLive today launched the latest version of its live content management system (CMS) to help journalists spread news in real time. Social media services deliver information at a rapid pace. ScribbleLive enables media companies to harness the immediacy of these technologies while maintaining the control required in the newsroom to cover developing news events in a new style that meets the needs of its audience – fast, engaging and collaborative.
ScribbleLive is a comprehensive live CMS platform that enables media companies and large organizations such as Reuters and Hearst Television, to report on developing news stories like natural disasters, sporting events and election results in an entirely new way online. Journalists can now report story elements from e-mail, SMS, Twitter, voice call or the ScribbleLive web interface – whether in the newsroom or out in the field. The result is dynamic content that provides real-time updates, including multimedia, to readers as the event unfolds.
The event pages reside on ScribbleLive’s servers, but otherwise maintain a seamless appearance with the organization’s existing website – to both visitors and search engines. After the event, the searchable webpages remain, so readers can look back on the way the story unfolded – a unique opportunity to see a “rough draft” of history as it was first written.
“People want news delivered quickly – They are turning to social media sites such as Twitter to access breaking information, rather than waiting for news outlets to push stories through editorial review,” said Michael De Monte, co-founder and chief executive officer, ScribbleLive. “ScribbleLive changes the traditional linear flow of the newsroom to a more dynamic, collaborative process that empowers real-time reporting and audience engagement while ensuring editorial control and journalistic integrity. With our tool, journalists are able to tell stories in a completely new way.”
This latest version of ScribbleLive offers powerful new features that:
A number of media outlets already rely on ScribbleLive. Global News, the online news arm of Canwest’s Global Television Network, used ScribbleLive to cover the G20 Summit that was recently held in Toronto. Highlights of the summit coverage included:
“Globalnews.ca’s live coverage of the G20 broke historic new ground for storytelling in broadcast and online journalism,” said David Skok, managing editor for Globalnews.ca. “ScribbleLive gave us the opportunity to showcase the depth of our talented reporting teams in real-time using multimedia via one-touch reporting. We have realized our vision of unifying the digital and traditional broadcast newsrooms, thanks to ScribbleLive.”
The Score, the broadcaster that delivers interactive sports reporting online and via the popular ScoreMobile iPhone app, uses the ScribbleLive platform to report real-time scores for the more than 300 sports teams it covers while empowering superfans to become the play-by-play commentators.
“ScribbleLive has truly helped us enhance our product. For our mobile sports app, live blogs have been a crucial differentiator. Sports fans love the immediacy of the blogger’s game description and appreciate being able to submit their comments. ScribbleLive’s system is fast and reliable, and they’ve made it remarkably easy to fully embed in our offering,” said Dale Fallon, director of mobile, Score Media.
ScribbleLive works in concert with existing CMS platforms. It is offered as software-as-a-service. The new version is available now. Pricing depends on the desired plan. Contact info@scribblelive.com for sales information.
About ScribbleLive
ScribbleLive is a groundbreaking content delivery platform that gives the new web generation what they want – news now. Without flaws and without delays, ScribbleLive enables real-time journalism and audience engagement. Users always have full editorial power and reader retention within their branded websites. Think of it as “live-to-air” for the web. With the immediacy of Twitter and the professional control of a CMS, users can maximize the impact of their brand and/or their advertisers with ScribbleLive.
ScribbleLive has been tried and tested by benchmark organizations like Reuters and Hearst Television and has been the lightning rod for such events as the iPad launch and the Red Bull Air Races. National media companies like Rogers and Canwest have used ScribbleLive to successfully engage their audiences in real-time.
It may seem obvious, but when you’re scrambling to report on breaking news, it is easy to forget about your audience. In the age of Facebook and Twitter where you make a post, and your number of followers has a bunch of zeroes at the end, it really feels like when you say something, people listen.
Of course, the reality is that everyone thinks that and the signal-to-noise ratio swallows a lot of signal. Say you have 5,000 followers when you make a tweet about a breaking news story. How many of those 5,000 are online right then (especially if you have followers in other time zones), with TweetDeck open, and not in the middle of something? That 5,000 can dwindle down to dozens. Now compare the reach of that 140 character message (minus 20 for the link), to a typical news site with thousands of actively engaged visitors a minute. It’s clear where the time should be spent.
A story’s breaking. You’ve gotten into your live journalism platform. You’ve posted the greatest content of all-time. But did anyone see it?
In the Web 2.0 world, when you wrote an article, a complex system of connections between companies would take care of promoting it for you. Google would index it. Your RSS feeds would send it to peoples’ readers. It would be Dugg and Redditted and delished. It worked like a charm, but how long did it take?
The most important part of live journalism is the first part: live. The story is breaking, you have the news that people want, and you need to get it out immediately. Live journalism is about Web Now. It’s the type of journalism that the new generation of visitors are looking for. There may be spelling mistakes and there may be corrections later on, but it’s live and it’s engaging.
Promoting your live article is all about making sure you have the distribution channels ready to go ahead of time, and they are ones that you control. You can’t be scrambling to find the password to a Twitter account when your audience is out there looking for your story. The most successful live articles I have ever seen on ScribbleLive find their audience within the first 10 minutes of their event. And for all the social media seeding tools out there, the best ways to drive an audience are the most old fashion: put a call-out on your home page, tell your friends via the social networks, and throw to the URL on-air. There’s no magic to it; if your content is engaging, your audience will follow the path and stick around. But if you don’t give them the path to follow, they’ll wander somewhere else.
If you’ve gone to all the trouble of getting people to bookmark your home page, follow you on Twitter, or subscribe to your RSS feed, you don’t want to tick-them-off by bombarding them with an event they don’t care about.
The worst example is probably “live tweeting.” We’ve all had a friend or co-worker that went to their first conference/music festival/vacation/etc. after getting Twitter, and you heard about it every 5 minutes for days. Imagine what your followers’ timeline would look like with Twitter. Facebook just gives up after a while and starts hiding all but the first status update. Either way, after the first few messages everyone who would be the least bit interested would have clicked on your link (you are promoting something, right?) and would have tuned-out.
A much better way is to only post your best stuff to the social networks; the most engaging content you have. Make one post to tell people you are covering the event, with a link back to your live article. When something big happens, post again. It could breaking news, or just a great quote. Either way, as you send out pieces of great content to your followers, even the people who weren’t interested initially will start to take notice, instead of being annoyed. In the end, less posts can mean more traffic on your site (and more revenue).
At the end of the day, it comes down to being realistic about your audience. In the age of social media, I often hear that success cannot be measured. Although it’s true that metrics like page-views are increasingly becoming obsolete with live journalism platforms that don’t refresh your page, we have to be realistic about the reach of a social media account versus a website. If you are running a news property, your words will almost always reach the greatest audience on your website because that is where the audience already is. If you make sure they know your great content is there (without overdoing it), you can drive a new level of engagement with your readers, and establish your presence in the live journalism media landscape.
(Photo by Christian Beirle González)
Because It’s Good has a great article on how Greenpeace covered their recent shut-down of an oil rig. Greenpeace is one of many great charities using ScribbleLive Enterprise to tell their stories and engage their communities.
We used a live CMS service called ScribbleLive, which has a voicemail function that allowed people onboard ship to call a number on a satellite phone to record a live account of what was happening. That audio could then be added straight on to the live update feed – no internet connection needed.
Blogs are great, but when you hear a voice over a crackly phone line with the sea outside it adds excitement to the coverage.
Starting at 8:00 PM today watch the live coverage of “Future of Media” from the Drake Hotel in downtown Toronto. What better use of ScribbleLive then reporting on location with our mobile app in real-time the panel discussion that will explore how social media, new media and mobile technology are impacting mainstream news coverage.
Posting content to live events via SMS and voicemail has become an important feature for many of our clients. When they have reporters in the field, we can now send a text-message directly to their phone, and the reporter just has to text-message back their content. It works great, it’s fast, and it’s easy.
For our Canadian customers though, although we can provide Canadian voicemail numbers through any number of providers (the best out there are Twilio or Tropo), I found it very difficult to find any company offering Canadian numbers that can receive SMS. There are a few “gateway providers” out there, but their implementations require everything from running your own cell-modem, to spending hundreds per month.
After much searching, I found Club Texting. They are a U.S. company, but they have the shortcode 212121 in Canada. You buy a “keyword” from them starting at $25/month which your users must start their text-messages with. For example, if you bought the keyword “keebler” your users would text-message 212121 with “keebler This is the rest of my message.”
After they receive your text-message, they have a number of options to deal with it including emailing you, SMSing you, and (most importantly) hitting your servers via a RESTful API.
So far, their service has been working great. For the Scotiabank Nuit Blanche Toronto city-wide event next month, we’ll be powering live screens all over the city. People will be able to send in their comments via SMS, which we’re going to be displaying on screens all over the city (as well as web and mobile phones of course). It’s going to be great. I can’t wait to watch the flood of messages coming in from a few million people 
(Photo from City of Toronto)
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