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Halifax Evening Courier to crowd-source interview questions

Posted: 29/05/08 By: Laura Oliver
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The Halifax Evening Courier will tomorrow launch an online feature enabling it to crowd-source questions for high-profile interviews that have been selected and approved by its readership.

The Johnston Press title is the first newspaper in the UK to make use of technology from interactive news site Yoosk that allows readers to submit and vote on questions they want to be put to interview subjects.

The newspaper has lined up local BBC weatherman Paul Hudson and police chief Ian Levitt for question and answer interviews using this new approach.

The Q&A sessions will be a collaboration between the two sites with the initial interview hosted by Yoosk and linked to articles on the Courier.

Staff from the paper will moderate the questions submitted and get responses to the five most popular. The answers will then be published as both print and online features by the paper.

Readers will also be able to rate the answers given by interviewees to the paper.

The paper's collaboration with the third-party website is part of a growing trend among local publishers looking to external sites to boost their online offering.

The Evening Leader has experimented with Twitter and Liverpool Daily Post earlier this month used CoverItLive to become the first UK paper to broadcast its daily conference live on the web.

"In print we have always given readers the inside track on what is going on in their community - with this partnership we can take this a stage further and put the reader in the driving seat when it comes to questioning local personalities and people in power," Mark Woodward, group editorial content manager for Johnston Press Digital Publishing, told Journalism.co.uk.

"The ability for readers to then rate and judge responses means accountability is also taken to another level."

The feature will go live on the Courier's homepage on Friday and has already attracted questions from readers since it was launched in beta yesterday.

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