by Sarah Wilson |  November 14, 2018

In today’s digital age, the definition of “sport” is broader than ever before. Today, sports are no longer confined to real players battling it out on a pitch or court, but can include virtual players too. E-sports, which feature real players controlling digital ones, have become increasingly visible and popular over the last few years. Business has boomed, with global revenues up a whopping 38.2% since 2017.

In a nutshell, e-sport tournaments are multiplayer video games played competitively by professionals before a crowd of spectators. The games vary from tournament to tournament, with the most popular including League of Legends, Dota 2, and Counter-strike.

The explosion of e-sports has also been great news for publishers and news outlets, who have expanded their coverage to include the tournaments. This year, our German news agency customers DPA, along with Hamburger Morgenpost, used Live Blog to cover Europe’s biggest Dota 2 tournament: the ESLOne Hamburg.

The Challenge

In most cases, the audiences tuning in to e-sports coverage are young, tech-savvy millennials. So when DPA decided to team up with Hamburger Morgenpost to cover the 2018 e-sports tournament ESL One, it was this audience they had to consider first and foremost when strategizing their coverage. The primary challenge, therefore, was to find the right format for reaching and making an impact on the target audience.

DPA, Hamburger Morgenpost and Live Blog join forces for the ESLOne Hamburg

“The format had to be fast, containing and frequently updating multimedia content” – Malte Weber, DPA

The Solution

As so many e-sports fans follow coverage online, the decision for DPA and Hamburger Morgenpost to opt for live, online coverage was a no-brainer. And with its easy-to-use interface and array of useful tools, Live Blog was the software the team arrived at.

“Regarding the target group, the decision to go for some sort of live coverage was obvious. As Sourcefabric is in use at dpa-live, including customised adaptations and adjustments, the decision to opt for Sourcefabric was obvious… obvious because of its easy tools for integrating content on customer’s website; obvious because of how easily users can edit content – especially with regards to embedding multimedia content”.- Malte Weber, DPA

The live blog feed

The Results

The editors behind DPA and Hamburger Morgenpost’s ESLOne coverage began posting updates from 12pm on the very first day of the tournament, keeping their audience updated with regular text posts, images and videos detailing the movements of players and score counts. The coverage was published without a hitch, and the editors were highly satisfied with the final result.

“It was self-explanatory, easy to use and fast. Embedding tweets, posts, images and footage sent from our reporters in the arena was especially fast and easy, revealing no difficulties or hidden traps”. – Malte Weber

If you’d like to catch up on the coverage from DPA and Hamburger Morgenpost, you can find their completed live blog here.

What can Live Blog do for your next big event? Request a demo or get in touch with us to learn more: saas@liveblog.pro

by Clare Charlesworth |  May 23, 2018

With a legacy that spans over 60 years, the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) has united Europe (and somehow Australia) through passionate singing performances – producing a combined 1,500 songs from over 50 countries. Only growing more popular with time, 2016’s Eurovision saw over 200 million people watching at least part of one of the three shows, making it the largest non-sporting TV event in the world.

Eurovision 2018 took place from May 8 – 12 in Lisbon, Portugal, with the overall theme for the contest being “All Aboard!”. With their active international fanbase, the Eurovision site was sure to receive tens of thousands of hits all at once, with many eagerly seeking out highlights, behind-the-scenes content and a second screen experience. And what better way to keep their fans informed than with a live blog; allowing readers to receive continuous updates through text and a range of multimedia.

The Challenge

With a fan base so engaged and actively scouring the net for the latest Eurovision updates, the live blog was sure to receive tens of thousands of concurrent users. Eurovision needed a live blogging software that would be able to withstand the pressure of that many users at once and one that would allow the organisers to prepare the coverage well in advance as to keep up to date with the scheduled performances of the artists.

The Eurovision Song Contest digital team needed a live blog that was easy to manage so that they could both create new content and publish already prepared content saved as drafts and contributions. Contributors needed something fast and simple to give continuous updates, incorporate social media and different forms of multimedia (photo galleries, YouTube videos of performances). Additionally, it was important for the live blog to fit in with Eurovision’s overall branding and corporate identity.

The Solution

In mid-April of 2018, the Eurovision Song Contest, through their representative, the Dutch digital tech agency Scrn, decided to use Live Blog as their live blogging platform for the popular song contest.

Well aware of the extraordinary interest surrounding the event, the Live Blog team made sure that Eurovision’s live blog would be able to withstand that many visitors at once. They completed several performance tests and upscaled Live Blog’s Cluster, making certain, in a small window of time, that Live Blog would excel in covering this immensely popular live event.

Live Blog adapted the look and feel of the ESC’s live blog by incorporating the fonts and colour-schemes associated with their corporate identity in a custom theme. This allowed for the live blog to fit seamlessly into the larger Eurovision branding.

The Eurovision Song Contest’s live blog complemented their branding nicely.

The Results

Two weeks after joining Live Blog, Eurovision’s live blog was already in use by the Eurovision Song Contest digital team to create a second screen experience for Eurovision fans. The digital team used Live Blog to share highlights of events, behind-the-scenes sneak peeks at the rehearsal process, YouTube clips of different performances and photo galleries of the performers. They were also able to use Unicode icons, making their posts more engaging and social media friendly.

The inclusion of YouTube videos in the live blog allowed for sneak peeks of the upcoming performances.

Social media was also easy to include in the live blog; the social media embeds were created by copying and pasting a URL, saving the digital team valuable time and effort.

It was easy for the Eurovision Song Contest digital team to incorporate social media into their live blog.

Marko, a member of Sourcefabric’s system team, remarked on the fact that even with the high interest for Eurovision’s live blog, Live Blog’s Cluster worked smoothly for both readers and editors throughout the coverage of the event.

By using Sourcefabric’s live blogging tool, Eurovision was able to maintain an exciting live blog that was continuously visited by many throughout the song contest. Those working behind-the-scenes at Eurovision were happy with the collaboration.

Sietse Bakker, CEO of Scrn, the Eurovision Song Contest’s official digital agency, said

‘the tool gave us what we needed in a very short amount of time. While a lot of people use Twitter while watching the shows and Eurovision has a very active presence there, the live blogging tool provided us with an opportunity to be spontaneous on the website as well. All with little effort and without a glitch’.

What can Live Blog do for your next big event? Request a demo or get in touch with us to learn more: saas@liveblog.pro

by Julia Vernersson |  March 7, 2018

M100 Sanssouci Colloquium is an international forum aiming to promote democracy and freedom of expression, bringing together Europe’s top editors, commentators and high profile public key figures such as Angela Merkel and Sigmar Gabriel, the German minister of foreign affairs. The latest meeting in September 2017 focused on the impact of recent political developments, as well as the future and responsibility of the media. Sophia Wellek from the M100 Sanssouci Colloquium staff says:

“Using Live Blog had a specific impact on the debate at the M100 Sanssouci Colloquium. We were able to provide a versatile coverage, which illuminated the debate from different angles and focused the event.”

M100 first used Live Blog in 2016 to train their team of young journalists in how to live blog an event. Experiencing the effect on the debate, the exposure of the live coverage and the benefits of having instant documentation, the M100 team found Live Blog was a must-have tool.

The Challenge

Live coverage is proven to raise engagement and reach a wider audience. In the setting of conferences, it brings an opportunity to add more diversity to the discussions. In cases where Live Blog is present on stage, the Live Blog editor can function as a moderator by embedding relevant tweets and comments from the audience, allowing instant interaction with the speaker. Sophia Wellek:

“Through the live blog different opinions were visible at the event and attendees could participate digitally in the debate. At the same time, quotes from speakers could be highlighted and content reproduced. As a result, the tool did not only enrich the discussions, but also facilitated the coverage of the event.”

With Live Blog, editors can embed tweets, short quotes, audio and live streams. As the M100 is an invite-only event, it is interesting to engage with a non-present audience online. The Live Blog posts themselves consist of short highlights and it is easy for an outside audience to quickly get an idea of what happened at the event.

What is live blogging’s advantage compared to using general social media channels? Live blogs are more versatile than Twitter hashtags, where information might get drowned in the volumes of content, and at the same time more open than a Facebook page, which requires membership to interact. Instead it is an ideal combination of curated social media content and content provided by the reporters on the ground. As it can be fully integrated into the design of a conference website, it is easy to reach out with information and connect with attendees.

The Solution

The M100 Live Blog was managed by 25 young journalists who took part in the event, and learned how to live blog throughout the meeting. With its journalistic workflows, Live Blog makes it easy for teams to collaborate and contribute, while editors are able to keep an overview, as well as prioritize and correct items before official publication. This is how Sophia Wellek from the M100 Sanssouci Colloquium staff puts it:

“By using the contributors’ function of the Live Blog we were able to correct errors in the documentation and interpretation of the discussions. Thus, we could effectively prevent the publication of false quotes and misunderstood statements.”

Following the event, the live blog functioned as curated documentation of the event and was seamlessly integrated into the design of the M100 website. Posts can be sorted in ascending or descending order, and important highlights can be filtered by users to get a quick overview of what happened. Also the possibility to pin prominent posts at the top of the timeline allows for the archived live blog to be kept as documentation of the event that people can refer to anytime afterwards.

The Results

Through our partnership with M100, we identified six advantages of using live blogging tools at conferences.

1. Live Blog makes it possible to cover an event fast and intuitively. The Live Blog Reporter app makes sure your live blogging team can collect all the content they need on the go, but also rely on content prepared as drafted posts prior to coverage.
2. Providing your press team with live blogging tools that follow professional journalistic workflows makes it easy to engage new staff, beginners and volunteers in live reporting. You can gather highlights conveniently through multiple channels with drag and drop functionality and review what is going online before it is published.
3. Deciding to add live coverage to an event promotes live interaction between attendees, speakers and even your outside followers.
4. A live blogging platform creates social media-friendly event documentation on the go, adding your own branded channel of information.
5. Live Blog enhances your relationship with your sponsors through specifically sponsored live blogs and advertising management in the flow of the feed.
6. Take advantage of extra publicity using our SEO-friendly theme, which will make your live blogging platform more visible to search engines.

If you are interested in using the best live blogging platform for your next event, get in touch with us: saas@liveblog.pro

We provide software solutions and can offer training and a custom introduction to our tools for your team.

by Anna Rohleder | Oct 4, 2017

In April 2015, Nepal was struck by the largest and most devastating natural disaster the small country had experienced in 80 years. It has been reported that nearly 9,000 people died as a result of the earthquake, and Nepal continues to feel the impact of the devastation caused to this day. While there was international media coverage of the earthquake, the Nepali Times was able to offer its readers a unique on-the-ground perspective. However, with the Nepali Times being a weekly publication, they lacked an avenue to give continuous updates to their readers in real time. That was the case – until they began using Live Blog.

The Challenge

As a weekly publication, the usual mandate of The Nepali Times is to provide analysis and commentary on the news rather than primary reporting. All that changed when the 7.8-magnitude earthquake hit Nepal on April 25, 2015.

As one of the country’s few English-language news outlets, the Nepali Times had an opportunity to provide its perspective on the disaster to a global audience. About half of its readership comes from outside Nepal.

However, there was no ready tool for real-time reporting of the earthquake and its aftermath, nor was there an existing format for such coverage.

The Solution

Live Blog was the answer to both issues.

Combining a web-based authoring environment on the back end with a live blog feed that can be embedded into the front end of any website, Live Blog is an all-in-one live coverage tool.

The open-source live blogging platform is also fast to set up and intuitive to use. These would constitute key benefits to any news organisation covering a natural disaster, but were especially helpful for a small outlet like The Nepali Times with a staff of less than a dozen. The Nepali Times debuted its own Live Blog just over a week after the initial quake, allowing the newspaper to cover the aftershocks as well as rescue and rebuilding operations.

The Nepali Times featured its earthquake live blog on the main section of its home page for several weeks and kept it available for five months afterwards. “Live Blog is great for when something has just happened,” says Ayesha Shakya, online producer for the Nepali Times. “It is best used when people are seeking news. Even when we did not have any updates as such, we found that readers were following the photos we posted.”

Case Study Nepali Times: Using Live Blog for Breaking News

The Results

Editors and producers at The Nepali Times added live coverage to their content portfolio in a short period of time. Live Blog also boosted the newsroom’s skillset, with the ability to curate updates from a variety of social media and post them in one place. The experience provided the inspiration to use Live Blog for coverage of the next big national news event, the revision of Nepal’s constitution, which happened just a few months later.

As a side benefit, Live Blog also offered an instant upgrade to the paper’s digital presence. “We found that Live Blog’s clean, simple design made our site look more modern and dynamic,” Ayesha Shakya said.

What can Live Blog do for your news organisation? Get in touch with us to learn more or request a demo.

About the Nepali Times

Founded in 2000, the Nepali Times is a weekly English-language newspaper with a strong digital presence. It has 41,000 fans on Facebook and 275,000 followers on Twitter.