The Art of Creating Exceptional Live Blogs

News journalists and editors today have a lot on their plate. Their content must be able to captivate broad audiences while disseminating information swiftly and offer an all-encompassing perspective on live events.

Notably, data reveals that 80% of website traffic will come from just 20% of stories, predominantly within the first 20 minutes of publication. In other words, the few, powerful stories that act as a magnet are mostly consumed immediately at the time of publication – a time window where publishers must nail any revenue strategies that they pursue tied to their publication, whether these are advertisement displays, paywalls or registration pop-ups, links to further expert content, and so forth.

However, there is the elephant in the room that easily competes with publications’ content and diverts readers’ attention and awareness to other platforms.

Drawing from the effectiveness of social media, the combination of short text updates and engaging visual assets, such as pictures, videos or graphics, effectively mitigates the attention span challenge. Numerous news publishers have adopted this approach in various formats, such as live content, news feed banners, and push notifications.

How do live blogs enter the picture? If your news publication doesn’t include a live news publishing strategy today, keep reading.

In this post, we’ll delve into industry best practices of newspapers that have become experts in creating exceptional live blogs, which not only capture readers’ interest but also ensure their continued engagement with their favourite news websites.

1. The Right Tool For The Right Type Of News

From sports events and election nights to extraordinary occurrences like the Ukrainian conflict or volcanic eruptions, providing timely news coverage is the essence of live blogs and is where news feeds are most effective. But there is much more to a live-blogging strategy than just timely coverage:

“A great live blog should feel like you’re being guided through a story by an expert as it happens. A bad one feels like a barrage of barely connected developments being thrown at you relentlessly. That sense of shepherding people through an event is at the heart of all our best work (…)” highlights the Guardian in a recent interview.

A dynamic timeline for the bigger picture:

Functioning as a continuous timeline, live blogs allow media professionals to chronicle events as they happen with short updates, where anchor points create a coherent storyline and can be pinned to the top to direct the reader to what is most important. This narrative technique allows for constructing a cohesive storyline, enriching the audience’s grasp of the unfolding events.

BBC live blog on the Gaza conflict, 2023

An anchor for in-depth analysis:

Certain events in your live news timeline deserve an in-depth exploration. Live blogs can be leveraged as a strategic tool for anchoring significant updates and direct readers towards in-depth content, including podcasts or complete articles. Adding these types of call-to-actions into the live feeds enrich the live blog story and introduces readers to your qualitative journalism.

Sky News links podcasts in their live feed

2. Expanding Audience Reach

Something new at every visit

“Users return time and again because they perceive each time that there is always something new and engaging for them,” shares DN’s Target Group Manager, Marit Tronier Halvorsen. “We see a lower risk of churn and a higher chance of gaining new subscriptions by meeting this need for instant, constant information.”

Regardless of whether your digital media strategy relies on ads or converting readers to subscribers, reaching a wide audience remains an important piece of the puzzle. Unlike a static article, live blogs give users a reason to come back and engage with stories as they develop, offering a dynamic platform that caters to the modern consumer’s demand for real-time information and interaction.

DN’s live feed carousel on their homepage.

A social media look & feel on publishers’ sites?

Today’s readers have developed a habitual preference for consuming concise content and are accustomed to being exposed to a plethora of visual aids (such as images, videos, and graphs), to have the option to engage in discussions with other users, and experiencing the endless scrolling feature that unveils fresh feeds each time they revisit the platform.

Depending on their strategy, live blogs can act as an audience engagement approach and take some or all of these elements and put publishers in control, but with the interactions happening on their website. This translates into increased traffic, increased ad revenue and an opportunity to showcase high-quality journalism to new visitors.

A recent study from Chartbeat analyzed the average engagement time of readers on news sites and found that readers typically engage for 28 seconds across all content. The study further analyzed the reader engagement for live blogs only during the same period, and found the average engagement time to be 48 seconds.

Iceland volcano live blog

3. Enhancing Narratives with Visual Assets

Given today’s visually-driven world, incorporating visual content into live blogs profoundly enriches storytelling and increases engagement with younger audiences. Gen Z and Millenials are vocal about their preference for short-form content combined with easy-to-digest storytelling and its combination with video.

The challenge for publishers in catering to these needs is the high cost of video content. Either directly produced or sourced, video is expensive to provide at scale.

This challenge can be effectively supplemented with the use of platforms like Oovvuu, for example, which provides editors with access to an extensive library of over 600,000 videos created by news agencies, broadcasters and other industry professionals. By making video content rapidly available – within 15-30 minutes of their production – journalists have the possibility to add further context to their live blog for greater visual stories without breaking their budget.

Access the Oovvuu video platform in Live Center’s live blogging solution

Key Takeaways

The first conclusion that can be drawn from the recent Chartbeat analyses, as well as after having examined prominent newspapers’ live blogs, is that when done correctly, live blogs can be an incredibly efficient tool to keep readers engaged and ensure their continuous loyalty.

Elevating a live publishing strategy implies more than creating compelling live blogs to broaden your audience reach. By harnessing the power of live blogs, publishers can effectively drive revenue opportunities, including affiliate revenue, ads revenue, increased subscribers and commercial partnerships with guest content providers, to name just a few.

We hope you found this blog inspiring. If you have any questions or are interested in learning more, book a free consultation with our live experts.