The dramatic story of a beached whale rescue was blogged live by a daily newspaper yesterday.

The News, in Portsmouth, led yesterday’s edition of the paper with the dramatic story of the seven-tonne, 20ft whale stuck on Hayling Island.

This was followed throughout the day with minute-by-minute updates using the CoverItLive software.

‘Whale Watch’ enabled rolling news coverage of the whale rescue on www.portsmouth.co.uk, including quotes from experts, and also gave readers the chance to add their own comments as the story unfolded.

Reporters also posted photos and video of the attempted rescue by local marine experts.

Digital editor Matt Brown said: “We knew it was going to be a big story when the nationals and Sky starting covering it but the amount of reaction and interest from people on the website has been amazing.

“We’ve had well over 1,000 unique users already on that page which is well up from what we’d expect.

“We’ll most probably lead with this again in Saturday’s edition.”

The whale developed kidney failure and muscle damage so was set to be put down but yesterday afternoon it managed to re-enter the water before being re-spotted around 5pm.

Matt said it had been a very successful couple of days for The News’ website after uploading one of the most-read stories of the year on Thursday.

A male naked sunbather became impaled through the groin on a rusty spike during a drinking session near Haslar Lake.

A normal Thursday for the website would attract around 12,000 unique users but this one story alone was visited by 14,000 unique users.

Matt said the only comparable story was the speculation surrounding Portsmouth FC manager Harry Redknapp and a possible move to Newcastle United.

The CoverItLive blogging software has become increasingly in demand among local newspapers.

In May, the Liverpool Daily Post blogged an entire edition from morning conference through to the 1am print deadline, encouraging readers to send in their suggestions.

And last month both the Daily Post and Liverpool Echo used the same software to tell readers about the four-day Tall Ships race which visited the city as part of the Capital of Culture celebrations.

Comments

chelsea (02/08/2008 08:07:31)
the whale was stuck in the houbour yesterday and the poeple who was sorting the whale out done a good job or the whale could of died. the whale could not of got out because it was stuck in the houbour where the boats where the whale got put down because it might die if u take it somewhere else with out no water.

Me (02/08/2008 14:08:40)
Question for Chelsea: Are you a journalist? If so have you heard of spell check, grammar and punctuation? Also what point are you trying to make?

jordan hills (03/08/2008 13:39:49)
i am sorry to say this but the whale that they were rescuing was put down due to damage of the whales liver so they had no choice but to get it back out of the water and put it down