The live blog is an opportunity to curate multimedia content and information from professional and non-professional sources ‘on the ground’, using editorial judgement in what to publish.
It’s a great collaborative tool for news organisations to cover major or breaking events, conferences or big issues using mobile tools and central monitoring to coordinate interactive content publishing, the audience then have the power to feed into the live stream and feel part of the process.
A live blogging strategy
As an example strategy, setup a CoverItLive blog and promote across all your platforms in advance where possible, setup initial questions if possible. Get all your journalist involved using Twitter, all their feeds can be added to the live blog, collectively creating the live blog stream without any other action required in its most basic form.
A manager can monitor the live blog, adding user comments and any related tweets as well as multimedia content and polls into the stream.
Specific Twitter hashtag feeds can be used if appropriate to integrate information from members of the public who may be at the scene and let the audience follow via Twitter if they prefer.
When to use a live blog
It has its place when suitable situations arise or events break as an important digital media publishing strategy that shows what can be achieved coupling journalistic skill and citizen knowledge with readily available digital publishing tools.
Editing and curating is a vital part of the operation, but this is clearly a different area of journalism from reflective, objective long-form pieces that would follow-up online and in print, but all have their value to the audience.
It’s just a new opportunity in a multimedia, multiplatform publishing world.
Further reading:
- Tips on tweeting live by Mary Hamilton – advice on choosing hashtags, sources and curation
- Twitter for journalists: beyond gathering and distributing content
- Styles of live blog: Guardian, New York Times, BBC, FT – Andy Bull, multimedia-journalism.co.uk
Tales from the age of digital 