Your Black Press community newspaper has the Tour de Rock covered.
As an official media sponsor of the 2011 Canadian Cancer Society Cops for Cancer Tour de Rock, Black Press has pulled out all the stops to give readers insight into every angle of the Sept. 24 to Oct. 7 ride.
We’ve even got a rider – Nanaimo News Bulletin reporter/photographer Chris Bush – on the team. He’s on Twitter (@chrisbushtdr) and has been busy tweeting and blogging (http://blogs.bclocalnews.com/bushsblog/) about his training journey and will be keeping it up throughout the two-week ride.
With less than a week to go before the riders embark from Port Alice and start their 1,000-kilometre pedal down-Island, Black Press newspapers have added lots of options for readers to keep updated on the tour’s progress.
Of course, our traditional print papers have already offered numerous news stories about the tour, the riders from each community, and the people who help them out.
On the web, we’ve expanded our Tour de Rock presence with a ride-specific site (www.bclocalnews.com/tour-de-rock/) with tons of ride-related content.
Each of our websites has several clear entry points to lead you to the Tour de Rock site, which includes lots of information about the ride, an interactive route map and official tour program available online, a TwitterFall (People can contribute to the ongoing conversation by following the hash tag #tourderock), a public Flickr photo gallery, videos, links to other Tour de Rock pages, as well as Chris Bush’s blog and ways to donate to him or any of the riders.
Readers can expect this site to start getting lots of activity, and even more fresh content.
Journalists in our various Island newsrooms will also be tweeting as the tour rides into their towns and loading stories and photos to the website as quickly as they can.
Readers can even help contribute by submitting their own photos to the Flickr gallery (www.flickr.com/
groups/2011tourderock/pool/) or videos – the more the merrier. To upload video, simply go to www.BCDailyBuzz.com, set up a profile and load your video.
It gets even better, Black Press is giving away two bike packages from Trek Bikes in Victoria – readers can enter at any Black Press office and online entry will be available once the tour gets underway.
Winners will be chosen and announced near the completion of the ride.