TEMPLE: Texting, tapping, clicking, tweeting, filming

By John Temple, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published August 23, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.

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Welcome to our guide to the Democratic National Convention.

While this section should give you everything you need to know about this historic week in Denver, I'd like to share with our regular readers and visitors alike a guide to the coverage you can expect from the Rocky Mountain News.

For Sen. Barack Obama, this could be the pivotal week of his long campaign.

We hope the same holds true for the Rocky in what has been a long journey from being just a newspaper to becoming a live source of news and information.

For the first time in planning for a major news event - and we've prepared in the past for everything from the pope's visit for World Youth Day to the Summit of the Eight - our focus has been first on what we would do on the Web, on how readers would experience our work on their computers and cell phones.

Then we asked ourselves how we would edit the massive amount of information we generated for the newspaper the next day.

It's not that we haven't been trying to take this approach in our daily coverage until now, but we saw the convention as the turning point, the day we would make it over the hump.

For us, the change is exciting. But it's also challenging. It's required many of us to learn new skills. We've been training for months, testing our new approaches to make sure we're ready to give you something different, something you'll value not just in the morning when your paper lands on your doorstep, but all through the day and night.

The Rocky will have about 150 journalists on the street covering every aspect of the convention. Their work will be featured on RockyMountainNews.com and on our mobile Web site, TheRocky.com. If you want to follow what they're reporting, you can sign up to receive their Twitter Tweets by going to RockyMountain News.com/twitter. If you want to see what's going on all over Denver, you'll be able to watch their video clips and see their still photos posted almost instantly on our Web site. If you want to comment on our Web site about what's happening, you'll be able to do that, too.

It's going to be a rich stream of content that we'll organize for you in real time to keep you atop everything from what the candidate is doing to which celebrities are in the Mile High City.

And every day we'll put together a special convention section wrapping the regular Rocky, something to keep to remember a week that could define the world's view of Denver for years to come.

My thinking is this: We need to make the newspaper coverage more insightful and explanatory, more how and why. More storytelling, which means great writing. You'll also find compelling photography from our Pulitzer Prize-winning staff. We think of ourselves as a daily magazine. And that's what you'll be getting.

That doesn't mean that our Web reporting won't be in-depth. But there our focus will be on keeping you up-to-date - on reporting the news as it happens - and on providing you the background to answer any questions you might have, everything from road closures to how this convention compares with our last in 1908.

There are some things we're going to be doing online that I want to make sure you don't miss.

* Rocky cartoonist Drew Litton, working with his buddy Rich Moyer, has created five animated strips having fun with the events and people of the convention. Drew has a wicked sense of humor, as many Denver luminaries can attest. I hope you'll watch his work - it's on our site now - and send it to friends around the country to give them a laugh. Drew plans to draw a daily cartoon for the paper as well.

* Video. We'll have more people with cameras on the streets than any other news organization, from reporters with cell phone video cameras to sophisticated, award-winning videographers. Our goal is to immerse you in the scene.

* In the past, we've published instant books to commemorate the most dramatic events in this city. Well, this time we're going to produce something we'll make available to a global audience - an instant multimedia retelling of the events of the week. Working in collaboration with MediaStorm, an Emmy Award-winning multimedia documentary company, the Rocky will have on its site next Saturday what we hope will be the definitive interactive account of an event that will be talked about for generations.

You won't be able to be everywhere this week. We will be. I hope you'll join us.

John Temple can be reached at editor@RockyMountainNews.com or by mail at 101 W. Colfax Ave., Suite 500, Denver, CO 80202.

• August 25, 2008

  10:42 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  edwardallen writes:

  But you need now to straighten out whether Obama has Kenyan citizenship, or not. That's what happens when you have 150 reporters, and no one editing what they write.

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