Blathnaid Healy’s Blog

I got the chance today to go on RTE One’s live election show Campaign Daily to talk about the election website with Bryan Dobson. Check it out on the RTE Player here (for people outside of Ireland try here) it’s around the 45 minute mark.

Don’t forget to check out RTE.ie’s election Twitter feed

RTÉ Elections 2009

In the last few weeks quite a bit of my time has been spent coordinating the website for the 5 June elections. It was launched this week and you can visit it here.

Check out the group blog  Campaign Daily – with great contributions this week from Mark Little (who had an excellent blog on RTÉ.ie for the US elections), Miriam O’Callaghan and Cian McCormack.

Visit us at Twitter @RTE_Elections and while you’re there  follow Prime Time’s new Twitter stream @RTE_PrimeTime as well.

There’s lots of great material on the main site including an excellent guide to PR-STV by UCD’s Prof Richard Sinnott (the system of voting used in Ireland), chapters from the just published and widely discussed All Politics is Local, lots of great audio and video highlights from RTÉ’s best news and current affairs programmes and features written by young journalists covering the European Parliament elections.

It’ll be a busy couple of weeks ahead as the website keeps on growing and the elections get closer but I’m looking forward to it particularly the count weekend!

Blathnaid

P.S By the way send us in your election photos!

Tomorrow RTÉ.ie presents a special series about technology in the developing world.

Joe Zefran, RTÉ.ie News Editor and I have put the cross-media series together.

Joe traveled to India and I went to Rwanda and Kenya where we reported and shot our own video for three reports on three programmes, including the Irish charity Camara, which are using three different approaches to reach the same goal: educating the world’s youngest citizens.

The series looks at how children in the slums of New Delhi are linked to the larger world, how one experiment wants to make sure every child in the world has their own laptop, and how an Irish charity is changing the lives of people in Kenya.

There will be full-length text features and web-exclusive interviews on RTÉ.ie/globalclassroom.

Plus, for the first time at RTÉ, RTÉ.ie will produce a three-part television series that will air on the Six One News and News on Two.

My reports will air on Monday and Wednesday and they focus on Camara and One Laptop Per Child.

This has been a very exciting project and I look forward to doing more like it in the future.

**Six One News reports**

Part One, Two, Three

And you can see it here.

As I said, thoughts on this will follow later.

From Monday The Irish Times’ website will be free to access, according to an article on page three of today’s newspaper written by the Editor Geraldine Kennedy.

The site is moving to irishtimes.com and ireland.com will become a separate, commercial site.

The new site will offer ‘richer content in the form of pictures, graphics, audio and video’. The article also talks about developing many multimedia features.

People who are paid-up subscribers to the site will get a full refund, or as Ms Kennedy notes could instead become members of the new Irish Times Crossword Club. In fact they can try out the new club before making a decision. Although with this economic downturn upon us I can imagine what most will do…cash is king after all!

You can read the story online here, I’d have put it up earlier but couldn’t find it free-to-view at first.

Going to digest this story a little this morning and write more on what they plan for their new website later on.

Damien Mulley shares some of thoughts on the current state of play and what’s ahead here

There are some good graphs, which provide a quick snapshot even if it is a bit of a rough guide to where things are at.

From UnaRocks

It will be interesting to see what the weekly newspaper will offer through its online outlet. Readers can now comment on stories over at the new website.

The breaking news section seems to carry the same stories as INM’s Independent.ie site.

40 people are set to lose their jobs following the announcement that the Monaghan, Cavan, Tipperary and Kildare Voice newspapers are to close.

The economy and British newspaper chains were blamed for the closures. Read the full story here.