How to utilize the power of live blogs
Norkon Team If there’s one thing we can learn from social media and its popularity, it’s this: freely accessible short-format text, with a heavy focus on visuals (images, graphics, or other) is a formula that works time and again, across age groups and cultures.
Coupled with the reminder that not every newspaper should be a publication for everybody, the balance of paid versus free news, topical focus, and short-updates versus long-format articles is something newspapers continuously reevaluate to match their newsroom strategy with their target audience.
A live strategy to propel your newspaper to the top
Live blogs take the best of the social media world into the safe and controlled environment of the newsroom. Replicating the simplicity to create content for publishers, live blogging tools have proven to be a great way to attract audiences with concise and fresh news.
“The Guardian has been using live blogs for 25 years”, The Guardian, 2023
“When it’s at its best, live blogs enhance the whole newsroom” – Sky, 2023
“10,696 new live blogs were created with Live Center alone in 2023, across 5 continents” – Norkon, 2023
When does a live blog make sense?
There are several scenarios where the nature of live blogs truly shines, which is the case in particular for time-critical events, such as national or local updates, weather news, political updates and sports news.
Perfectly well-suited for this type of breaking news or time-sensitive updates, live blogging platforms enable the dissemination of quick news without taking the journalistic focus away from in-depth articles.
DN’s Target Group Manager, Marit Tronier Halvorsen, explains “With live blogging, we can constantly deliver short-form news, which is really fast to publish, and satisfy that requirement for breaking news. Live blogging enables a kind of just-the-facts news flash that creates an impression of something new being published all the time.”
4 Ways A Live Blogging Platform Provides Competitive Advantages to Publishers
Here are 4 points on how a live strategy can help your news organisation to:
- Inform: Break the news first and keep the public updated on the latest events by publishing on the fly
- Engage: Open the dialogue or build a sense of community by engaging your audience
- Monetize: Score on revenue with ads, affiliate revenue, reader registration or subscriber conversion
- Empower: Back your newsroom strategy by enabling your editorial team to publish news seamlessly and efficiently as events unfold, regardless of their location or device.
Effective strategies for audience and subscriber acquisition
As stated earlier, a live blogging approach is a highly efficient way to attract audiences to your news site. Here is how live blogs can support newspapers’ digital conversion strategy:
Audience attraction: Establishing a trusted news source
Gain traction on time-sensitive stories that inform and engage your audience. With real-time updates to breaking stories, content creators can make headlines and establish themselves as a trusted source.
Audience engagement: Building returning reader habits
News sites have observed that readers have a higher tendency to return to a news site if they perceive that there is always something new and engaging awaiting them. DN recognized a lower risk of churn and a higher chance of gaining new subscriptions by meeting this need for instant, constant information.
Audience conversion: Fostering reader loyalty
Beyond minute-by-minute news reporting, live blogs can be utilized in various ways to introduce and redirect readers to your in-depth journalism. As an example, live blogs can function as a topic timeline, where publishers can insert links toward gated articles, or encourage readers to sign up to a newsletter, download their app or listen in to related podcasts.
Sky News and NZ Herald have done exactly this, prompting readers to take action while scrolling through live feeds:
Download the full brochure for more information and discover our pick of best live-blogging examples.
To sum it up, a live-blogging platform like Live Center can act as an entry point to your live strategy to push free readers through your conversion funnel.
The world of the news and media industry is a tough one, where publishers are on a mission to fight misinformation, face budget cuts and job reductions, need to identify new sources of revenue, and keep up with new reading preferences and the demand for 24/7 news cycles – there is no shortage of challenges for that sector.
Thankfully, there is best-in-breed live-blogging technology readily available to improve the workflow of newsrooms. Get in touch if you would like to learn more or try it out for free.
