THON Coverage Roundup

The Daily Collegian

The Daily Collegian’s THON presence was huge. As Editor-in-Chief Terry Casey wrote on his blog,

We’ve got five laptops, cameras, video cameras, voice recorders, spare notebooks, extra reading material and a slew of staff members signed up for shifts until Sunday.

Photography
The Collegian was a little slow in updating its online photo offerings, but it now has all of them up. The interface isn’t great, but the pictures are.

The pictures that ran in today’s print edition were awesome, especially the one of the Four Diamonds kid wearing a football helmet he found while visiting JoePa’s office.

Blog
When the Collegian relaxed its print-based standards, the THON 2009 blog was great. This happened with greater frequency as the weekend wore on. It felt weird to me to read what were basically abbreviated newspaper articles on the blog. Content should be adapted to fit the platform. Some posts that worked really well on the Collegian’s blog were the post about the line-dance and the quickly produced interview with My Hero Zero.

We also really appreciated the transcription of the THON lyrics. Thanks MC.

Video
The Collegian’s video coverage was very impressive. Indeed, the paper was updating its video offerings quicker than its photos. They have video of two of the most emotional moments of THON: Family Hour (including JoePa’s appearance) and the unveiling of the fundraising total. Their video player isn’t ideal, but it’s not too bad.

Articles
The Collegian’s flagship is still its print edition and, as such, it’s to be expected that its articles are high quality. We weren’t let down today. The Collegian had an eight page insert dedicated to THON 2009. Our favorites are ‘Families share stories of struggle, gratitude‘ and ‘Thon DJ provides Moore‘ (we love puns).

We also liked the costume roundup. It reads like a bizarro police log, with passages like,

The Geico Gecko was spotted both on the floor and circling the concourse.

The quotes found on the dance floor’s table tops were also really interesting.

Penn State Live

Penn State Live is the university’s official news source.

Articles
The news source some stories about THON, but most of them had Collegian equivalents that were better.

Photography
The pictures that come out of the Department of Public Information are always good. They put up four galleries from THON weekend:
*** THON ’09 under way
*** THON ’09 in full swing
*** Entertainment keeps dancers going strong
*** THON raises record $7.49 million

College of Communication

Audio Slideshows
Students in COMM 498D were assigned to produce an audio slideshow during THON weekend. You can find all of the slideshows here. Our favorites were the one about the line dance and the one about the Ice Hockey Team’s penguin routine.

Video
According to the College of Communications, students from COMM 498F and COMM 383 produced a live webcast of THON. The streaming video on the official THON.org site didn’t work, but we’re pretty sure that the stream provided by UStream was the one produced by those students. It isn’t accessible now, but it was pretty sick.