Cover it Live

Aspiring citizen journalists have a useful new publishing tool in Cover It Live, reports The Globe and Mail.

Cover It Live is a publishing platform that embeds within blogs. It enables publishers to live-stream coverage of sports events, conference calls, keynote presentations or anything else that simply can't wait.

Readers can leave comments on the sites as they watch.

The software been used by both bloggers and news outlets like ABC News and The New York Times — which, to satisfy both TV and print news consumers, are under growing pressure to bring relevant news to viewers more quickly than online media.

Live-blogging, the process of covering an event live on a blog or other instant-publishing medium, is increasingly popular for tech-industry conferences and keynotes, coinciding with the rise of citizen journalism, whose proponents include YouTube as well as mainstream news networks.

The logic follows that ordinary "citizens" with camera phones or SMS may appear at a media-worthy event long before the media do. If networks can make it easy for these citizen journalists to upload that content on existing news websites, so much the better: networks get fast, free news; and citizens get broader coverage than they would on their blogs.