Ifra XMA Cross Media Awards Projects
 
   Company: Guardian Newspapers Ltd
   Project name: Ashes Coverage
  General information about the publication
   The Guardian newspaper has an average daily circulation in excess of 372,000 (ABC audited, May 2007).
Online, www.guardian.co.uk is the UK's most successful newspaper website. It attracted in excess of 16 million users (ABCe audited, May 2007) and recently won the Webby for the Best Newspaper on the Web for third year running.
  Project description
   Guardian Unlimited took its already renowned cricket coverage to new heights during the winer when England travelled to Australia for the eagerly anticipated rematch of the epic 2005 Ashes series. Previous England trips had been covered mainly by the newspaper, but this time our web resources went above and beyond what was available in print.
  The basic idea of our project
   Our live over-by-over reporting, so popular that it has spawned a host of imitations on rival websites, continued to pull in huge numbers of users while the play was going on, and enhanced its reputation for combining razor-sharp cricket analysis with off-beat banter. But, for the first time on an overseas England cricket tour, the on-line was boosted by high class web-specific writing from our team of reporters in Australia.
  Used Media Channels
   Newspaper    Online
   Online Radio / Podcasting
  The Implementation
   At the close of each day's play, our writers - Mike Selvey, Richard Williams, Gideon Haigh, David Hopps and Lawrence Booth joined forces to file a report on the day's play with a blog focussing on some of the less mainstream aspects of the cricket, and a verdict on England's progress.
These added extras appeared on Guardian Unlimited within an hour of the close and ensured that British readers who would otherwise have had to wait another 24 hours to read considered analysis of the same day's play in the paper, were immediately up to date with what had been going on while they slept.
This widely read written content was backed up by an entertaining but informative podcast involving one of the writers in Australia, our over-by-over reporter and occasionally a county cricketer who had watched the action in England.
  Image(s)
  Links
   www.guardian.co.uk/sport
  Project results
   The coverage was known to be highly regarded by other cricket writers in Australia.
Taken as a cross media package, the Guardian provided the most thorough coverage of the Ashes of all the other national newspapers.
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