5Live
BBC 5 Live is to reach beyond its core sport audience with its new online feature, 'The Election Story'.

The feature is an interactive timeline charting election-related audio from the 5 Live radio network during the campaign, and organising it around the main themes of the election.

Users can scroll though a timeline, above which float the topics of the day. The more talked about the issue, the bigger the topic 'word' on the cloud. Click on a topic and you will be taken to different audio clips from different 5 Live shows.

It also draws in user conversation taking place on other platforms: Twitter, Facebook, blogs and SMS messages. "The size of the word in the cloud denotes how much discussion there has been on that day about any issue," the BBC explains.

The new interactive is part of Radio 5 Live's mission to broaden its audience. Too often the station is associated with its sports coverage and not its news, 5 Live interactive editor, Brett Spencer, told Journalism.co.uk. 

Plans in place for election 2010 include interviews between party leaders and Nick Campbell on 5 Live Breakfast. Live video streams of the party leaders will also be available.

Victoria Derbyshire will host four debates around the UK, in which listener questions will be put to politicians directly.

Finally, after the election Derbyshire's programme plans to give every newly-elected MP a 5 Live listener-written "MPs guidebook" detailing 15 things that "every MP should abide by".

Spencer hopes the audio interactive will help build a "complete picture of the campaign".

5 Live has been leading the way on audio 'chapterisation', he said. This means that producers select segments of the best parts of the day's radio and provide it on demand.

This segmentation "means that we can tweet those chapters, put those chapters online, promote them from our front page, do a lot more with those audio chunks," says Spencer.

It makes audio much easier to find, with better tagging of content. 5 Live's expanded reach is also helped by online livestreaming and the TV news multiscreen, with the red button facility, which allows people to find 5 Live content through their digital TV.

Spencer is particularly excited because the 5 Live content will be featured on, and linked to from the BBC's main election microsite, bbc.co.uk/election and from the Radio 4 Today programme site as part of a move towards more cross-programme interaction.

"They'll be driving traffic to us: from the main BBC election site to this application. A lot of traffic we get from this will be from those partner sites. Obviously, we recognise that the news website and Today, in terms of traffic, are bigger beasts than us.

"And that's good, because one of the things we want to do with this is drive new audiences to 5 Live, particularly an audience who thinks we're only a sports network, or that doesn't consume us in a regular fashion."

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