Almost all Norwegians followed today’s ceremony in which US president Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel peace prize. Here are snapshots of how 5 of the local news sites covered the live event.

For a small country like Norway (4,5 million people) a visit by the president of the USA is a huge news story in itself. Add to that the controversy around awarding Barack Obama the Nobel peace prize, and you have one of the biggest events of the year.

All major news sites thus have been planning for weeks how they will win users on this big news day, especially during the peace prize ceremony itself. This is a type of event you would expect editors to try to be innovative in their journalism online.

Here are live snapshots of how the five biggest news sites covered the peace price ceremony as it was taking place. It is not an attempt to analysis the total coverage. Naturally all of the sites had comprehensive coverage in addition to what I show you.

It is the first time I try to blog in this format, so please apologize if not everything is top quality.

Here are the 5 news sites mentioned in the report:

Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama

• VG.no: This news site, run by the newspaper VG, is by far the biggest news site in Norway. With 3,5 million unique visitors every week, it is also one of the biggest newssites on a global basis. Live feed. Main story of ceremony
• Dagbladet.no: The tabloid newspaper is struggling for survival, but the web site has been doing quite well. About 2,2 million unique visitors per week. Live studio.
• Aftenposten.no:  Run by Norway’s leading quality newspaper. About 1,1 million unique visitors weekly. (Disclaimer: I work for Aftenposten, but have not been involved in planning the peace prize coverage)
• NRK.no:  The web site of Norway’s state-owned broadcasting corporation. Has achieved significant growth in traffic during the last year, especially due to its popular weather site Yr.no. Currently around 1,8 million unique visitors weekly.
• TV2.no: The web site of Norway’s largest commercial television station. Around 1 million unique visitors weekly. Live page.

As you will se from the video blog many of the news sites used the service of Coveritlive to add speed and interactivity to their coverage.

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Just a note at the end: This blog post was created using the Procaster tool of Livestream. It is an experiment for me. Please let me know what you think.

Barack Obama brings the presidency into the online world. His weekly addresses to the nation will no longer only be broadcast on radio, but also as a video message on YouTube and other social communities.
Here is the first YouTube addresss of a president to be, recorded on November 15th, 2008:

Many expressions are used to describe the online policy of the new president, such as “Fireside Chat 2.0″ and “the YouTube president”.

Barack Obama’s channel on YouTube – with almost 2000 videos uploaded -is already extremely popular – and the first weekly address (above) had been viewed almost 500.000 times only a day after it was published. It certainly is an indication that more people will be watching the president’s speeches than ever before, as ReadWriteWeb points out.

An interesting detail: The option for users to comment on the weekly address video has been disabled on the YouTube video.  Is it an indication of the huge challenges the new presidents office will have in managing the online presence?

In any case – distributing the weekly address on YouTube certainly is a strong symbol of change, Mr. Obama’s main buzz word.