Journalism students at University of Limerick have trended number one on Twitter for a live news day they hosted this week.
Limerick Voice, a digital news project run by journalism students at UL, hosted a first ever live news day this Tuesday.
The UL journalism 4th year and masters students utilised social media platforms to share their coverage of news, sports, health, and politics, with articles produced every half hour for the Limerick community.
The Limerick Voice team practiced social distancing in their live news coverage as reporters were in 12 different locations across three continents, delivering live and local news to Limerick from 1pm to 9pm.
UL journalism lecturer Kathryn Hayes said: “Working to rapid deadlines, the Limerick Voice Live news day event is an ideal opportunity for trainee journalists to put their time management skills into practice, and develop remote interviewing and reporting skills, which is particularly important as they prepare to enter the fast paced workplace.”
The Limerick Voice 2020 team, whose mission statement is ‘When Limerick speaks, we listen’, distributed news content for their community throughout the day.
They produced 20 stories in eight hours across written, visual, and aural mediums. The traffic across social media platforms amounted to 17,000 Twitter impressions, 359 likes, and 151 shares / retweets.
The hashtag #LimerickVoiceLive climbed its way to the #1 trending spot in Ireland, directing views to the Limerick Voice news site and broadening its reach.
The student-run digital news project has been in operation since 2008, with the aim of telling stories from the heart of Limerick. The news site offers a fresh, youthful perspective on stories affecting the local community, not only just reporting the facts, but actively reflecting the interests of their readership in every article, podcast and video.
This is the first year that Limerick Voice will run throughout the whole year, as opposed to the usual 10 weeks, and digital editor Mike Finnerty explained: “We’re out to create a news website that’s the first port of call for the Limerick region. There’s always a million and one stories to be told.”