Online news case study: breaking news over multiple platforms

A mantra I've always lived by is go big, or go home. Further, I've always held that if you're to do something, do it right. Don't half-ass a job - carpe diem, baby. If you'll permit me a bit of ego stroking, I'd like to use my own company as an example of how to do things the right way and all out when breaking news online.

I just finished doing multi-platform coverage of a local news event - during a newstalk TV program my station produces, a guest (a local senator) strongly implied he would be running for governor during the 2006 elections. This was huge. My news director and I scrambled and wrote a story on-the-fly and got it online. But it's not enough to just put up a story and call attention to it. Not for us anyway.

We published the story in the following formats:

• Text story accessible via our public WWW site, printable version, our WAP site for wireless phones and our PDA site
  
• In-page alerts, as well as e-mail and SMS notifications
  
• Streaming video of the televised interview
  
• Audio podcast of the story (voiced by yours truly)
  
• Video podcast of the televised interview
• RSS feed
• JavaScript headlines import utility
• SOAP web service for custom programmatic data access
  

We've dramatically increased our overall traffic by providing such facilities and investing in methods of diverse data distribution. A lot of people just can't be at a desktop computer, waiting to get the news pushed to them. We also bank on the near-instantaneous indexed of Google News, blog trackers and the general blogosphere picking up the story to give it community momentum.

Realistically there will probably only be a few hundred people who access the story across every available format, download every exhibit and check out each interactive. Once you've seen the story it doesn't make a lot of sense to read it repeatedly over multiple platforms and devices. But it's still nice to give the end user the option. Anything less is dreadfully inferior.

That's how we roll. We're KUAM - and we aim to please.