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March 13, 2023

12 Reasons to Use Live Blog Pro to Cover Breaking News

The Latest Updates for our Live Blog Reporter Mobile App

12 Reasons to Use Live Blog Pro to Cover Breaking News

By Manolis Zografakis | March 13, 2023

As a journalist or media professional, covering live events in real time can be a daunting task. Whether it’s a political rally, a sporting event  or breaking news, being able to provide up-to-date and accurate coverage is critical. That’s where Live Blog Pro comes in. A powerful and user-friendly live blogging tool, Live Blog Pro enables journalists and media professionals to cover live events like a seasoned veteran – no matter how expansive or limited your resources may be.  When it comes to live updates, Live Blog Pro has you covered. With real-time posting capabilities, you can provide breaking news updates as they happen, ensuring that your readers stay informed and engaged. This is particularly important for live events where timing is critical. Here are 12 reasons why Live Blog Pro is a great choice for your live blogging needs:

1.Easy to Use

One of the standout features of Live Blog Pro is its ease of use. With a simple and intuitive interface, even those with little or no experience in live blogging can quickly get up to speed. This makes it an ideal choice for journalists who need to cover live events quickly and efficiently.

2.Easy integration

Live Blog Pro also offers multi-platform support, allowing journalists to integrate in easily with their existing website or CMS. Whether you’re using WordPress, Drupal or Joomla, Live Blog Pro makes getting started a snap.

3.Customization

In addition to its powerful live update capabilities, Live Blog Pro also offers a range of customisation options. You can customise the appearance of your live blog, including the layout, font and color scheme to create a unique and professional-looking live blog that reflects your brand or publication.

4.Collaboration

Live Blog Pro allows multiple journalists to contribute to a single live blog simultaneously, making it ideal for covering large events or breaking news stories.

5.Social Media Integration

With simple embedding options, Live Blog Pro allows journalists to integrate social media content into their live blog, including tweets, Instagram posts and YouTube videos. This enables readers to get a more complete picture of the event being covered.

6. Analytics

Live Blog Pro also provides real-time analytics, allowing you to see how many people are viewing your live blog and what posts are generating the most engagement. This information can be used to refine coverage and improve future live blogs.

7. Live Blog Pro Mobile App

The Live Blog Pro mobile app allows journalists to live blog from their mobile phones, making it easy to cover events on the go. With the app, journalists can quickly publish updates, upload photos and embed videos, as well as moderate comments, all from their mobile device. This is particularly useful for covering fast-moving events, such as breaking news and protests, where being able to quickly share updates can make a big difference in the quality and accuracy of coverage. The mobile app is available for both iOS and Android, and is designed to be user-friendly and easy to use, even for those who are not technically savvy.

8. SEO friendly

The platform’s use of structured data helps search engines read the content of your live blog, leading to higher indexing and better search engine rankings. Learn more about Live Blog’s SEO capabilities.

9. Post scheduling

Live Blog’s new post scheduling feature enables users to schedule posts for publication at any time in the future.

10.Smart discoverability

Live Blog allows editors to create and apply as many tags as they want to each post, making them searchable on a granular level. Readers can filter content by selecting from a dropdown menu of available tags so that they find what they are looking for.

11.Monetisation Opportunities

There are many ways to generate revenue with your live event coverage. For instance, you can create branded versions of a  blog to offer an attractive package to sponsors, place  native ads or third-party ads within your blog, or use affiliate marketing to embed links and promo codes in product features. Learn more about monetising your live blog.

12.User comments

Live Blog Pro provides a user-friendly and interactive way for readers to engage with content through comments. This feature allows for a more immersive and engaging experience for the audience, as they can share their thoughts and opinions with other readers, event participants or speakers. Moreover, the moderation options enable publishers to keep the comments section clean and constructive.

In conclusion, Live Blog Pro is the ultimate tool for live event coverage. Its user-friendly interface, multi-platform support, live update capabilities, customisation options, collaboration features, social media integration, analytics and mobile app make it the go-to choice for journalists and media professionals who want to cover live events like a pro.

Book a free demo Pro for free for seven days, no strings attached, to see for yourself how our live blogging platform can take your live event coverage to the next level.

February 27, 2023

Real-Time Coverage of Northern Ireland’s Elections with Live Blog

Introducing Live Blog Go

Real-Time Coverage of Northern Ireland’s Elections with Live Blog

By Gregory Bruno |  February 27, 2023

How Sourcefabric’s professional live blogging platform helped The Irish News punch above its weight

When The Irish News set out to cover Northern Ireland’s 2022 Assembly elections, it wanted to bring readers real-time coverage of the ballot as it unfolded. Would DUP’s Gary Middleton hang on to his seat in Foyle? Was this the end of the road for Belfast North’s Nichola Mallon? How would the Alliance Party fare?

But with only three staffers on its digital team, The Irish News needed a live blogging tool that was flexible, fast, and scalable. Editors turned to Live Blog for help.

“We knew that covering elections in 18 constituencies, with the possibility of vote counting going into a third day, was going to be difficult for such a small team,” said Maeve Connolly, the newspaper’s deputy digital editor. “Live Blog allowed us to provide content quickly and in real-time. What we were able to produce with this tool was very impressive.”

Last year, Live Blog developers created a feature called “output channels,” which makes it possible to manage sub-blogs from a main parent blog.
The Irish News had used blogging software for past news coverage, but not Live Blog. Most recently they’d opted for an even more basic route – creating an article in their CMS and treating it like a live blog by manually typing a timestamp as they wrote.
This meant that readers needed to pick through an endless scroll of content to follow the election action.
“It was a single post with a timestamp that couldn’t be surfaced easily,” Connolly said.

The Assembly elections in 2022 were an entirely different user experience.

Before Election Day, editors created tags in Live Blog for every constituency – Northern Ireland has 18 voting districts, and five assembly members from each are elected to fill the 90-seat chamber.

 

They then created 18 output channels. These output channels function as separate blog pages with unique embed codes and URLs that can be edited from the main blog.
As journalists at the counting centers fed content to the newsroom, the digital team uploaded the news items, tagged it, and hit publish. Live Blog did the rest.

To give their coverage extra visual heft, the paper’s digital editors took advantage of Live Blog’s customization tools and color palettes, and then embedded their blogs onto pre-built pages with maps, graphics, and voting statistics.

“What Live Blog allowed us to do was present content in a much nicer fashion than before,” Connolly said. “It was stylistically and functionally so much better than what we were able to do previously.”

In the future, Connolly says she’d like to see Live Blog integrated into more of the newspaper’s coverage – from breaking news to the more mundane aspects of government policymaking, like committee hearings.

One thing is for certain, Connolly said: When voters go to the polls again this May for council elections, “Live Blog will be there.”

A powerful live blogging platform is a must for covering elections of all sizes (as well as other live events). Try out Live Blog from Sourcefabric for seven days free, no strings attached. Get your trial version here.

Ready to begin liveblogging?

Getting started has never been easier.

Buy Live Blog book a free demo

October 25, 2022

7 Must-Have Live Blogging Software Features for Large Events

Journalism: 7 Must-Have Live Blogging Software Features for Large Events

7 Must-Have Live Blogging Software Features for Large Events

By Jenny Dabon |  October 25, 2022

Live blogging is a brilliant method to produce real-time content while maintaining social connections and audience participation in a society where information spreads faster every day.

The interactive aspect of online discussions, coupled with easier and more efficient methods, allows everyone to report on something occurring in the present, regardless of location.

Live blogging is a contemporary method for providing real-time information on a topic or event through text, photo, video, and audio content. Its foundation consists of a single page or content automatically refreshed upon uploading new content.

Why Use Live Blog Software?

Real-time news delivery is essential in today’s globalised world. However, publishing news items is a lengthy process. Gathering data, conducting interviews, editing photographs, and styling articles takes time, even for a brief piece.

Here is where the live blogging platform comes into play. Live blogging consists of publishing continuous updates to a  blog on a live event instead of a report after the engagement has concluded.

If you can deliver regular information and insightful commentary via live blogging during a tech product launch, your viewers will likely turn to your site for event coverage. Additionally, live blogging may increase your blog’s presence in web queries and rank with search engines.

When an event occurs, you may use a live blogging platform to update a live blog on your site, publish the same content to all your social media accounts, and embed social media features into your live blog with one click.

According to Regional Research Reports, the global  live blog software industry was worth more than $688 million USD in 2021 and is expected to hit more than $1.45 billion in 2030, with an annual growth of 9.43 percent between 2022 to 2030.

Must-Have Live Blogging Features

1. Image Slideshows

By using the picture slideshow tool, rather than posting a single photo in a post, you can arrange many photos and display them to your viewers as a photo collection.

2. Rich Media Posts

Offer a multimedia experience to your audience by adding animated GIFs and incorporating image slideshows, video streams, and other multimedia forms in your publish feed.

3. Social Media Post

Software used for blogging has a built-in and user-friendly social search where you can search for and integrate content from social platforms quickly and easily.

4. User Comments

The user commenting capability of live blogging software enables you to include immediate comments in real-time. Readers can express their perspectives on the topic you’re reporting on, contribute valuable information, and provide eyewitness accounts. A reliable live blogging solution lets viewers interact immediately with your live blog via mobile devices.

5. Blog Analytics

The analytics tool enables you to monitor your live blog’s unique views in each embedded location. Analysing performance based on data allows you to determine what works, and what doesn’t.

6. Custom Post Types

You can determine what to show your audience with a few basic and quick options. The live blog software tools provide a range of embedded code that offers the most significant user experience without requiring complex programming.

7. SEO Optimisation

Embedding native or remote advertisements into your live blog’s timeline is one way to  monetise live coverage. Optimising your live blog SEO features may increase your search engine ranks and attract more visitors.

According to Search Engine Journal, 49 percent of marketers cite organic search as the marketing channel with the highest return on investment. So, ensuring that your live blogging solution offers SEO optimisation features is important.

Live Blogging Strategy for Events

1. Choose a Live Blogging Platform

Using a live blogging platform, such as Live Blog Pro, gives you advantages over your blog. These solutions include content walls, event statistics, private chat rooms, spam management, and more to help you engage your viewers and promote social engagement.

Furthermore, you can incorporate your live blog into your blog, increasing the visibility of your event coverage. A live blogging solution also enables contributors to publish on your live blog and allows you to immediately live-stream the event.

2. Prepare Before the Event

You must select a relevant activity with the appropriate audience. The live event should be related to your niche and appealing to your followers. You must also create goals for your live blogging. Finally, you should prepare as much as possible before the event because you will need to publish updates immediately.

  • Check Event Website

An event’s website is an excellent starting point for researching. For example, if a product launch features LMS systems for educational institutions, you can visit its website for more information. You can obtain the event’s schedule and information on its speakers, partners, learning management systems providers, and business participants. With this data, you can conduct additional research about LMS systems and develop essential content for your live blog, including links and speaker details.

  • Reach Out to the Speakers

If the live event has a webpage, it will likely include the event’s itinerary and speakers. Try contacting them on social networks and informing them of your intention to film the event. And if they interact with you, express your enthusiasm to hear from them.

  • Create Templates and Graphics 

Incorporating images is beneficial because it engages readers and improves SEO. According to a recent study by Microsoft, the human attention span has dropped to eight seconds. This is why it is crucial to get your audience’s attention through visually pleasing elements.

However, generating graphics takes time, so you should try creating them in advance by using online tools like Canva. If this is not feasible, you should build or download design templates with adequate space to incorporate event-related information or quotations.

  • Prepare to Talk to Your Viewers

People appreciate insider information about events. You must therefore draft questions to ask the event’s presenters and attendees. You can obtain their perspectives on the event if you speak with the presenters. Alternatively, you may talk with participants and inquire about their impressions of the event.

You can also inform your social media followers that you will conduct interviews during the event and request questions. You may be stunned by the inventiveness and inquisitiveness of event-related question-askers.

  • Post Live Event Blog Coverage

For live blogging breaking news as it occurs, use live blogging solutions, such as Live Blog Reporter, and beat the race with personalised, real-time, interactive news and content.

  • Live Stream at the Event

If you want to enhance your audience’s experience after the function, you can live stream in addition to live blogging. It helps your viewers receive a more complete and detailed account of the event.

If you have a team, one of you can operate the live-streaming camera while others live blog. If you are traveling alone to the event don’t forget a tripod. You can place the camera on a tripod and concentrate on live blogging while the device handles live streaming.

Check if the live blogging service you use to cover the event enables live streaming. If so, you can stream live directly to the blogging platform. If it doesn’t, choose a site with the largest viewership, such as YouTube.

  • Maintain Connection with Audience After the Event

You might explore expanding the event’s coverage to reach a broader audience. You can then publish your live blog on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

Blogging in real time should always be organised with the primary objective in mind. Covering events and news is a means, not an aim.

Insertions such as advertisements, connections to other information, QR codes, and calls-to-action will become beneficial when many viewers are attentive.

All of the engagement generated by live broadcasting may be utilised to generate leads. A CRM tool can easily divide leads into groups and put them on lists to make following up easier. Browse through Pipedrive reviews to learn how they can help you keep track of deals and events.

Interest, context, and worth constitute the formula for convincing customers to take the subsequent move in their journey toward you and your business.

Enhance Live Blogging Experience with Live Blogging Solution

Journalism

Photo by Flo Dahm, taken from Pexels

Regardless of the events you choose to cover or the strategies and tools you use for your approach, using live blogging software is an excellent approach to engage your followers and promote your brand while participating in significant events. Integrating with larger, more comprehensive marketing tactics becomes a valuable asset for a company’s brand.

Looking for a better live blogging solution? Try out Live Blog from Sourcefabric for seven days free, no strings attached. Get your trial version here.

Ready to begin liveblogging?

Getting started has never been easier.

Buy Live Blog book a free demo

November 1, 2021

How to use Live Blog’s SEO features

How to use Live Blog’s SEO features

by Helmy Giacoman |  November  1, 2021

One of the key advantages of having a live blog for digital publishers is the SEO boost that real-time news coverage provides. In this post we look at the technical side of SEO in our Live Blog platform and explain how you can make the most of this in your settings and on your website.

Part 1:  ESI and SEO

First, let’s take a look at what Live Blog is, and how it relates to your other content. In essence, Live Blog is a curated timeline of news updates marked with a timestamp. In technical terms it is a group of HTML elements that can be embedded into third-party websites by using an embed code, which takes care of loading that curated timeline of news into the host website.

To host their live blog, many publishers use an iFrame embed code – an HTML element that is used to insert content from a third-party source – which is the quickest way to integrate content from Live Blog into their website. For users coming to the host website, there is no visible difference between Live Blog and any other content.

Here is an example iFrame embed code:

<script src="https://test.liveblog.pro/embed.js" defer></script>
<iframe id="liveblog-iframe" width="100%" scrolling="no" 
src="https://test.liveblog.pro/lb-test/blogs/6172fcbdab5f4af0268694e2/index.html" 
data-responsive="yes" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

For search engines, however, the iFrame element (officially called an Inline FRAME) used by default by Live Blog makes the content unreadable and, as a result, does nothing to improve the quality and quantity of your website traffic. That’s because the iFrame is like an envelope, and the Live Blog is like the letter inside. If you want the postal service (i.e. search engines) to read the letter, you have to provide them specific instructions to do so.

The way we recommend to open the envelope and present the letter is by activating the Live Blog advanced ESI (edge-side include) feature  in your theme settings.

To activate the ESI option, follow these steps:

  1. Log in to your Live Blog instance and click on the burger menu on the top left to open the “Theme Manager.” 
  2. Open the “Settings” dialogue of your theme (based on the default theme) and switch on the option to “Optimise the Live Blog output for ESI.” 
  3. Your output will now be rendered in a way that it can be included right into your webpages making use of ESI technology. Please note that if switching on this option, the output will not work properly as a normal iFrame embed anymore, since we are removing some markup from the output that is required for this purpose. 

After switching on the rendering for ESI, the markup of the “LIVE” output will change and editors can copy the respective URL and put it into their articles to be handled by ESI. The URL can be found in your general settings under “embed code” and look will something like this:

<script src="https://test.liveblog.pro/embed.js" async defer></script> 
<esi:include src="http://test.liveblog.pro/lb-test/blogs/6172fcbdab5f4af0268694e2/index.html"/>

Part 2: Configuring your servers

Now comes the more technical part. Many websites use a caching engine – such as Varnish – which sits in front of a server to deliver content and balance load. After toggling on the ESI embed feature in your Live Blog instance, the next step is to work with your infrastructure team to configure the backend of your website, including any caching engine, to recognize this ESI content. 

Fortunately, most developers will be able to do this rather quickly. But If you need tips or have other questions about Live Blog, get in touch with our support team at the Live Blog help desk.

Looking for a better live blogging solution? Try out Live Blog from Sourcefabric for seven days free, no strings attached. Get your trial version here.

Ready to begin liveblogging?

Getting started has never been easier.

Buy Live Blog book a free demo

August 4, 2021

Reaching Readers in Germany with Live Blog Pro

Live Blogging Bavaria

by Gregory Bruno |  August 4, 2021

When news breaks in the German state of Bavaria, there’s a good chance Passauer Neue Presse (PNP) has broken it. And when PNP’s news reaches its audience, there’s also a good chance that it was delivered via Live Blog, Sourcefabric’s professional live-blogging software.

Since 2017, PNP has been using Live Blog to report the events of the day. What attracted PNP’s editors to the platform was its ease of use, and Sourcefabric’s commitment to data protection and an open-source ethos. But what has kept PNP a Live Blog customer is the platform’s ability to tag and deliver content to specific audiences, a feature that became essential during the pandemic.

Roland Mitterbauer

“Before Covid-19, we mainly used Live Blog for urgent reporting and breaking news, where the situation changes constantly,” like election nights, disasters, and important political stories, explains PNP Deputy Editor-in-Chief Roland Mitterbauer. “But during the coronavirus crisis, we began using Live Blog for long-term coverage for the first time,” a decision that was done out of necessity.

Because PNP’s coverage area is huge – as the largest German state by landmass, Bavaria makes up one-fifth of the country and is home to some 13 million people – PNP editors needed a way to segment content based on regions and topics. Covid-19 was (and remains) a global story that affects people differently by region. The delivery of news content, therefore, must be targeted. With filtering and tagging options built in, Live Blog makes this easy.

“Our cover area is large. To serve it, we maintain a single Covid-19 blog, but each post in this blog is tagged with a region so that we can offer single blogs for each region in our distribution area by using Live Blog’s features (such as social media integration and photo galleries). We include these features on regional special pages that are enriched with data journalism and include the live blogs as a textual supplement.”

PNP’s Live Blog use case is similar to Norway’s NTB news agency, which has adapted their instance of Live Blog to target audiences with greater precision. NTB has also configured their internal publishing systems to publish content directly to Live Blog, which editors there use to enhance breaking or live event coverage with feature stories and multimedia content. PNP has also tested integrating its publishing system with Live Blog, via RSS feeds, to make it easier to target content to content-specific blogs.

Even after Covid-19, PNP plans to continue experimenting with Live Blog as an additional resource for publishing and production. “We’ll be using Live Blog again for the federal election in September [2021],” Mitterbauer says. “Moreover, with the Live Blog Reporter app for Android and iOS, all our editorial teams have access to Live Blog and so they can report directly from their smartphones. Our claim as a local newspaper is to score with regional content in the federal election as well and to report on the elections in the region.” Live Blog stands ready to assist.

Looking for a better live blogging solution? Try out Live Blog from Sourcefabric for seven days free, no strings attached. Get your trial version here.

Ready to begin liveblogging?

Getting started has never been easier.

Buy Live Blog book a free demo

June 21, 2021

Using Live Blog for Live Coverage of a Tech Product Launch

Using Live Blog for Live Coverage of a Tech Product Launch

by Gregory Bruno |  June 21, 2020

For tech titans, product launches are good theater, and great business. In 2020, Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), an annual showcase of the company’s latest products and features, drew 23 million online viewers, dedicated fans who hung on every word before opening their wallets. 

Tech product launches are also good for news organisations, as gatherings like WWDC present opportunities for media outlets to reach new audiences. But for editors, product launch events can present a quandary. Does a new phone feature or fresh OS really warrant a feature story, or would a news brief, photo, or social media update suffice?

With Live Blog, editors don’t need to answer this question. That’s because a product launch can be covered by any combination of the above content, and then some.

Designed by journalists for journalists, Live Blog is jam-packed with features making coverage of product launches seamless for newsrooms, and endlessly engaging for audiences.

For instance, the Live Blog backend allows for easy post scheduling, a great feature if you’re covering an embargoed event or if you want to push out a post at a specific time – linked, say, to when a key speaker is scheduled to take the stage.

Published posts can also be individually shared to social media simply by mousing over the sharing arrow in the lower right corner of a post in your blog’s timeline. This makes it a breeze for readers to amplify your content and raise your blog’s profile. 

Live Blog is also great for teams. With no limit to the number of users, and with granular user access controls, privileges can be adjusted to ensure that only certain users have publishing rights. Team members can file their copy, photos, or videos directly to the blog’s backend, and editors can control what goes live, when.

Once published, users can even filter content based on tags, from oldest to newest, or vice versa. This allows readers to decide for themselves how they want to engage with your content. For live product launches, it might make most sense to see the oldest post first, reading the blog in chronological order without scrolling to the bottom and reading up. By contrast, readers of a Live Blog covering a sporting event might be interested only in the results, so seeing the newest post on top would make most sense.

Finally, Live Blog can be configured to ingest content from any CMS, making it easy to add Live Blog as a publishing channel. Using a third-party application called Integromat, you can create a webhook to automatically pull content into your Live Blog instance. This content can then be set to auto-publish to your Live Blog or require approval from an editor. At NTB, Norway’s leading news agency, editors on the Sports Desk use this feature to create a richer blog experience for their readers, supplementing live event coverage with in-depth features and analysis from the NTB wire. News organisations covering product launches could deploy a similar setup, taking their coverage to a new level.

Public product launches have been part of the tech business long before Apple made them synonymous with Silicon Valley. But while inventors like Alexander Graham Bell and Guglielmo Marconi organised events in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to present their communication devices (the telephone and wireless telegraphy, respectively), the reach for these gatherings was limited to the scientific and technical communities.

 If only they’d had a Live Blog.

Looking for a better live blogging solution? Try out Live Blog from Sourcefabric for seven days free, no strings attached. Get your trial version here.

Ready to begin liveblogging?

Getting started has never been easier.

Buy Live Blog book a free demo

May 21, 2021

Live Blog: The ‘Missing Link’ for Norway’s Sports Fans

Live Blog: The ‘Missing Link’ for Norway’s Sports Fans

by Gregory Bruno |  May 21, 2020

Norwegians love live sports. In 2019, for instance, more than 1.2 million people – nearly a quarter of the country – tuned in to watch Norway dominate the FIS Nordic World Ski Championships (Norway won 25 medals that year; Germany, in second place, took home just nine).

For print and online news producers – in Norway and far beyond – live sporting events present a coverage quandary: how can their journalists deliver content that audiences want even as broadcasters deliver the action in real time to people’s living rooms? At NTB, Norway’s leading news agency, the answer lies in Live Blog.

NTB’s sports journalists have begun using Live Blog to supplement the news agency’s live event coverage blogs with in-depth analysis, multimedia, and long-form reporting. Terje Alstad, Head of Sports Data at NTB, says when done properly, a live blog provides content that broadcasters cannot.

“When you have photographers or journalists on site, they can send whatever they have into the Live Blog feed,” says Alstad. “For example, if a Norwegian skier was angry that he didn’t get a medal, our photographers might capture a photo of the guy throwing his helmet, which can give readers of the Live Blog fresh insight and on-the-ground colour.”

NTB Sports is also using Live Blog to share stories from the new agency’s wire that might be of interest to sports fans following live event coverage – like a regular article from the race, a feature story, or a photo essay.

Until now, live blogs played more of a supporting role in the news agency’s sports coverage. Data from the Norwegian Football Federation, for instance, is fed into NTB’s internal backend and delivered to clients as box scores and automated stories; Nettavisen, one of Norway’s most popular online news sites, uses NTB data to power its football live blog. But last year, after NTB set up an easy integration between Superdesk, the newsroom’s open-source CMS, and Live Blog, to report on the constant flow of Covid-19-related news, other desks within the news agency started to take notice. NTB’s Sports Desk has been among the most ardent converts.

Today, Alstad says NTB is delivering its enhanced sports Live Blog content to some of the country’s largest news publishers, including Nettavisen and Dagbladet. Even TV broadcasters have signed up. NTB is a “third party for TV 2,” says Alstad, meaning that NTB’s “reporters are choosing and sending stories to the broadcaster for inclusion in their live blog so that TV 2’s editors don’t have to.”

Alstad adds: “This integration between Superdesk and Live Blog has improved our sports coverage; it is kind of the missing link for our live blogs. Now, we can supplement our live event coverage with interviews and other stories, material that can be managed by editors on the desk. With this extra content capability, Live Blog’s usefulness has been extended.”

Looking for a better live blogging solution? Try out Live Blog from Sourcefabric for seven days free, no strings attached. Get your trial version here.

Ready to begin liveblogging?

Getting started has never been easier.

Buy Live Blog book a free demo

April 28, 2021

Building New Real-Time News Products

Building New Real-Time News Products

by Gregory Bruno |  April 28, 2020

Since launching its Covid-19 Live Blog early last year, NTB, Norway’s leading news agency, has continued to integrate the live blogging platform into its editorial workflow.  

New Live Blogs have included a December 2020 feed to report on the aftermath of a massive landslide near Oslo, and another in January to report on the riots at the US capital.

For editors in Oslo, this has enabled more immersive storytelling, bringing clients and their readers richer content in a more efficient, streamlined process. 

“In the last year we’ve been a lot more focused on news bulletins and live coverage,” says NTB technology and development editor Magnus Aabech, who is spearheading the agency’s live blogging strategy. “The format itself has become really important for NTB based on client feedback. And, with the Superdesk-Live Blog integration that we launched in early 2020, we can give clients what they want in an easy-to-digest and publish format.”

Replicating Benefits: Building New Products and Services

Because the integration with Live Blog is CMS-agnostic – it can be configured with any content management system – news producers of any size can use the Live Blog platform in much the same way as NTB. For instance, if a news agency or other content creator was covering their region’s elections, stories from their CMS could be published to their Live Blog via an API, and this content could then be syndicated to subscribers as an extra service. 

This is exactly what the NTB Sports Desk is doing. During the FIS Nordic World Ski Championships this winter, an NTB reporter worked the event live, providing readers with real-time coverage of the races and events. Editors, meanwhile, were able to feed the Live Blog with articles and features sent directly from the CMS. And because Live Blog enables multiple users to work together on a single blog, NTB’s photographers were able to file their pictures directly to the Live Blog, providing on-the-ground insights that not even the television networks could manage. 

Together, this collection of live updates, fresh photos, and in-depth reporting gave readers comprehensive coverage of one of skiing’s most important annual events. It also became another product NTB offers its customers.

“The Live Blog integration with our CMS has given us a new area of publishing capability,” says Aabech. “Live Blog is customisable and can do a lot of the work for us. Even internally, it’s been a great way to get people to think more visually about the content we distribute.”

NTB’s Live Blog Journey

When the coronavirus pandemic hit Norway, NTB turned to Live Blog as a means to distribute content quickly and in a more targeted fashion. As Norway’s biggest news agency, NTB’s bread and butter is short wire reports and breaking news, content that was being produced at a rapid clip during the height of the outbreak. But most of NTB’s clients – newspapers, news websites, and other traditional publishers – could only make use of a fraction of the agency’s output. There were simply too many stories on the wire for a news publisher to slot into their website in real-time.

To solve this challenge, NTB technologists, working with Sourcefabric, developed a simple configuration to connect Superdesk, the newsroom’s CMS, with Live Blog, our professional live blogging platform. The goal was to make it easy for NTB’s content users to integrate curated blog feeds into their own website, eliminating the need to trawl the NTB wire and update content throughout the day. Clients could either embed the NTB Live Blog feed directly into their website, or, by using an API, adjust the look and feel of the NTB Live Blog to match their own visual brand.

“Live Blog has allowed us to provide our clients and subscribers with richer content, mixing photos, graphics, and visually driven elements in a single feed,” says Aabech. “It’s really been a great way to tailor content to our clients’ needs, and to find new ways to deliver our journalism.”

To do more with less, news organisations need tools that increase efficiencies and streamline content output. Tools like Live Blog can help.

Looking for a better live blogging solution? Try out Live Blog from Sourcefabric for seven days free, no strings attached. Get your trial version here.

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November 25, 2020

Using A Live Blog for Black Friday Deals

Using Live Blog for Black Friday Deals

Using Live Blog for Black Friday Deals

by The Live Blog Team |  November 25, 2020

Once Black Friday was only part of the holiday shopping season for retailers. Today it triggers major consumer activity for anyone in the content business: not only when readers make purchases, but also for reading reviews and checking out what the trends and must-have items are for the season. That’s why Black Friday can be a big opportunity for publishers too.

Brands, retailers and news media all benefit from the extra attention that consumers pay to their favourite websites on the last Friday in November in search of deals on the stuff they want to get or gift. Typically those must-have items span a range of categories, from electronics and household goods to makeup and fashion, each offered by a variety of retailers or websites.

Using a live blogging platform as a real-time deal ticker, publishers can present all of the latest promotions in one place. Here are some examples from around the web:

  1. Becleverwithyourcash.com
  2. Sonicstate.com
  3. Nettavisen.no
Netavisen Black Friday Live Blog

Netavisen’s Black Friday Live Blog

And this year, with brick-and-mortar stores closed or at limited capacity, customers will be doing most of their holiday shopping online. Publishers can benefit from this trend by inking an affiliate or referral agreement with retailers.   

How a Black Friday live blog works  

A Black Friday live blog is one part editorial curation and one part affiliate marketing.  

Publishers can either earn a commission when readers go on to visit a retailer’s storefront from the deals mentioned on the live blog, or sell paid placements directly. Another benefit to publishers’ websites is the increase in traffic. One publisher told us that their Black Friday Live Blog, and the live video that goes with it, boosts traffic by 43% on Black Friday over their daily average of 700,000 daily readers.  

Readers not only see it as a service, but also a fun read they enjoy spending time on. In particular, they may appreciate the personal touch added by a blog’s editors.

Live blogging special deals year round

The official week of Black Friday runs from the last Monday of November to the first Monday of December. However, savvy editors start adding the pre-holiday promotions as early as late September for those deal-hunters who never stop searching for the best bargain.

How can Live Blog boost your content monetisation strategy? Get in touch with us for a personal consultation.

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July 23, 2020

Live Blog’s New Tagging Functionality for Digital Publishers

Live Blog’s New Tagging Functionality for Digital Publishers

by Todd Jatras |  July 22, 2020

The recent release of Live Blog 3.8 introduced a new tagging feature that improves the discoverability of live blogging content for digital news publishers and their readers.

Previously, it was only possible to search on the content within a timeline by three criteria: newest, oldest, and editor’s choice. But editors can now create and apply as many tags as they want to each post as it’s published, making posts within a blog timeline searchable on a granular level. 

Readers will now see an additional dropdown menu, labeled Filter Content, that displays all the available tags they can search on. If, to use one example, a reader of a blog on Premier League football was a fan of Liverpool F.C. and was interested only in items relevant to their team, they could pull down the menu, find their team’s name, select it, and the blog timeline would only display Liverpool-related posts.

To create tags to include in a post, go to Live Blog’s General Settings (see image below) and type them into the Global Tags dialogue box. If a term is not already there, you will be given the option to create that tag. These tags are global, and once they’ve been created they will be available to all the different timelines within a publisher’s blogging portfolio.

Live Blog 3.8, New Tagging Functionality
To apply these tags, there is a Tag(s) dialogue box in the editor field, on the bottom of each post. Type in the first few letters of the desired tag, and the predictive text will list available tags below it based on that criteria. In the example below “pr” brought up “press freedom” (highlighted in blue). Select the tag(s) you want, and click update. If the tag you’re looking for is not there, go to General Settings and add it.


When looking at the same post live, from the reader’s perspective (see below), the “press freedom” tag we just created appears under Filter Content.

 


When the reader selects that tag, only content containing that term will be displayed in the blog timeline. 

This new level of search granularity is convenient for both readers, who may be interested in dipping far back into their favourite blog’s archive, and publishers looking to get a better handle on their overall blog content production.

Want to see what Live Blog can do for your publication? Sign up for your free trial here: https://calendly.com/naveed-gill-dkk/30min?month=2024-04

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