The recent announcement that The Associated Press, in coordination with Livestream, will provide live streaming coverage of 82nd Academy Awards represents a growing trend in news coverage. The segment, called AP Live "Oscars Red Carpet," will embed live footage with various social media elements to supplement and enhance the viewing experience, all in real-time. One can draw a comparison between this event and the major American news organizations' coverage of President Obama's health care summit, discussed in a Poynter article. In addition to airing regularly scheduled coverage, the news organizations turned their websites into interactive hubs providing streaming coverage of the summit while giving viewers the ability to provide their own commentary in real time. CNN's iReport in particular, received hundreds of user-generated videos, while MSNBC.com created a wall of what people were "tweeting" throughout the event.

Both events represent the efforts of news agencies to provide viewers with the best informed and the most up-to date viewing experience. These demands are increasingly difficult for news agencies to satisfy, as they are challenged to provide viewers with intelligent and informed content within the confines of reader's shorter and shorter attention span. If a reader or viewer is unsatisfied they can easily find the same information somewhere else.

While news agencies encourage and benefit from user participation, there is very little profit to be made in offering the service. As many have already noted, users have come to expect free access to the information and the ability to participate in the discussion. This allowed for second party services like CoveritLive to step in and offer news agencies a ready made platform on which they can host real-time discussions among users while generating profit from advertising. However, CoveritLive still does not provide an answer to optimal combination of social media forms and content most appealing to viewers.

Source: AP press release, Poynter