The AP’s UN General Assembly coverage team used collaboration and fresh angles on stories to draw audiences to this annual world gathering of diplomats to Manhattan.
This year’s text report was built upon two principles: Aiming high on enterprise and experimenting with story form. Many pieces were spot enterprise that was specifically designed to accommodate a few paragraphs of speechmaking but dealt with broader issues. The live blog, which ran for the first three days of the meetings, was a repository not only for incremental developments and quotes from speeches but also the kind of random and educated observations that brought the proceedings to life. A video-driven story that examined the attitudes of demonstrators at the barricades showcased newfound ability to mash things up on AP News. Finally, the team produced a daily briefing each day requested by Digital News.
The stories added nearly 650,000 pageviews to AP News by Monday morning. Several stories had more than 200 customer downloads. Stories about India’s spat with Canada as it came into the UN and Venezuela’s asylum-seeker situation did very well on social. Several interviews were taken that no one else had, including with the UN’s nuclear chief, the CEO of the upcoming climate talks and the prime minister of Pakistan.
Leaders tend to notice stories written about them at the United Nations. This year, Columbia’s president retweeted a story about him twice — but did not retweet a fact-check that found artificial applause added to the video about his speech.