Scoop Launches Live Parliamentary Business Website

Tuesday, 19 October 2010, 11:42 am
Article: The Scoop Team

Wellington Oct 19 – A new website dedicated to the timely and accurate coverage of the New Zealand Parliament was launched today by Scoop Media Limited, publisher of the website Scoop.co.nz, in association with veteran parliamentary journalist Tom Frewen's InHouse Broadcasting Limited.

ParliamentToday.co.nz will feature a combination of breaking coverage of parliamentary proceedings as they happen provided by Scoop, as well as the daily and weekly radio-ready audio reports from Tom Frewen and Reesh Lyon covering the debating chamber and the select committee rooms.

ParliamentToday.co.nz is hosted and powered by the Scoop.co.nz publishing engine which was originally launched in 1999 as a service providing public access to parliamentary press releases and speeches.

Since 1999 Scoop.co.nz has grown to become New Zealand's largest independent online news publisher and has a monthly audience of 500,000 visitors a month.

Scoop General Manager Alastair Thompson - himself a member of the Press Gallery since 1993 - says the addition of the ParliamentToday.co.nz service to the Scoop publishing stable extends New Zealand's largest and most read parliamentary news resource website in a useful and interesting fashion.

"This new site will make Parliament's comprehensive online resources more accessible by providing an entry point which enables people to immediately find out what is going on right now in Parliament."

Mr Thompson says that it is planned over time to expand the depth of the coverage of the site and to add more regular features.

"However the site will stick to its basic ethos as very much a no-spin, accurate and timely chronicle of parliamentary business."

Tom Frewen who has covered the proceedings of Parliament for 16 years for radio says the new site will provide a very useful home for the content produced by his team.

"For several years this content has been available on the Scoop.co.nz website - but not in a single easily accessible place," Mr Frewen said.

The Today in Parliament radio-ready news service is funded by the Office of the Clerk of the House as a public broadcasting service. Its reports are broadcast on several New Zealand radio stations including the Radio Live national network, Access and student radio stations.

The reports, which are produced daily when Parliament is sitting, summarise the highlights of Parliamentary business in an easily accessible form.

"The new website ParliamentToday.co.nz will provide a useful complement to our radio reports - and also to the radio and television broadcasts of Parliament as it will allow interested people to nearly instantaneously find out where parliamentary debates are up to, voting numbers on bills, whether bills have been passed or sent back to select committee or otherwise dealt with," Mr Frewen says.

"While this information is presently available via Hansard after the event it is not immediately available as it happens, and this is the main niche that this new site will serve."

Via the website subscribers will be able to subscribe via RSS, Twitter or Email alerts to a feed of these parliamentary business notifications.

The Scoop team acknowledges the assistance of web designer Dan Slevin and graphic designer Janet Gudmun in preparing the new site for launch.

ends

For more information contact Scoop's Alastair Thompson on 021 707044 or InHouse Broadcasting's Tom Frewen on 027 407 9143

© Scoop Media

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