ATLAS, CMS and New Challenges for Public Communication

On 30 March 2010 the first high-energy collisions brought the LHC experiments into the era of research and discovery. Millions of viewers worldwide tuned in to the webcasts and followed the news via Web 2.0 tools, such as blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, with 205,000 unique visitors to CERN?s Web site. Media coverage at the experiments and in institutes all over the world yielded more than 2,200 news items including 800 TV broadcasts. We describe the new multimedia communications challenges, due to the massive public interest in the LHC programme, and the corresponding responses of the ATLAS and CMS experiments, in the areas of Web 2.0 tools, multimedia, webcasting, videoconferencing, and collaborative tools. We discuss the strategic convergence of the two experiments? communications services, information systems and public database of outreach material.