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Flood-hit council turns to multimedia blogging for news updates

Posted: 01/08/07 By:
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Crisis hit council workers in Cheltenham have set up a multimedia blog to keep local media and the public up-to-date with the rapidly changing news, announcements and photos of the flood-stricken town.

The Cheltenham Borough Council Flood Updates blog, hosted by free blogging service wordpress.com, has been popular with public and reporters looking for up-to-the-minute situation changes - attracting 20,000 page views in the first four days.

The immediacy of the site and its quick fire style is a world away from the council's normal strategy of posting official announcements as press releases on a dedicated web page.

The council's web development officer, Pete Riley, said the decision to use a blog this way was an easy one, and widely supported by council staff and elected members.

"We've been using Wordpress for our staff intranet for some time now, so a lot of people here are very familiar with how it works," he said.

"When the flood crisis hit us, we just thought that a Wordpress blog would be the way to go. We decided to use the hosted version and wordpress.com because we couldn't be sure that we'd have a reliable electricity supply here at the office. This way, any of the team can update the site from anywhere, including our home computers if the need arises."

The blog has been used to offer advice about emergency water supplies, encourage people to recycle their plastic water bottles, display a supportive letter from the Queen, and post photos of the damage done to the town's leisure centre.

Blog content is supported by multimedia in the form of photos at Flickr and a handful of video clips on YouTube.

Sam Shepherd, news editor of the Gloucestershire Echo, told Journalism.co.uk the blog proved to be a useful supplement to other news sources.

"It's definitely a much better way of communicating and we have used it a couple of times," she said.

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