Script: You may have caught our live coverage of the Republican National Convention. We seemed to have cameras where ever the action was and were reporting what was happening hours if not days before the legacy media. So how did The UpTake, a non-profit that operates on a shoestring and the kindness of donors, manage to out-do the multi-million dollar corporate media? Simple: Train, Organize and Crowd source. We discovered people learn the most when we do hands-on, one-on-one sessions to cover the basics. Most important was to give people feedback on what they did. Now you have a bunch of people who can run a camera and want to cover news. That’s great! But what are they all going to do? This is where applying the same organization techniques used in political campaigns comes into play. We turned to free services available on the web to keep track of volunteers, story ideas, events and of course equipment. The challenge was to connect volunteers with story assignments and equipment. We didn’t have our own equipment to start, so we created a database of equipment our volunteers owned and were willing to lend out. We let people submit story ideas to our website. The hard part was finding volunteers to cover those stories. So we put one person in charge of just connecting volunteers and stories. (video of Recount and trial) Organizing volunteers was integral to our marathon coverage of Minnesota’s US Senate recount and Election Contest Trial. The UpTake was the ONLY media to cover every minute of this and thousands around the world watched daily... for several months. Standup: Organizing can be as low-tech as listing what might happen on a sheet of paper and asking people who is interested in going there with a camera. It can also be as high-tech as using the cutting edge tools. Using Cover it Live and Twitter during live events we’re able let our audience help us with the reporting. The time stamp on both services helps us locate the important snippets of video out of the hours we ...
