by Greg Bruno | Jan 20, 2020
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News & Updates
Tips and Tricks
January 20, 2020
Mobile Blogging with the Live Blog Reporter App
Mobile Blogging with the Live Blog Reporter App
In the modern media landscape, audiences expect news when it happens. Live blogs are one of the fastest ways to deliver it, and with our mobile blogging tool, updating readers has never been easier.
In this post (and in the video below) we’re going to demonstrate how to set up and use the Live Blog Reporter App, which gives your blog writers the ability to write and file from anywhere.
We recently tested the app at a pro-democracy protest in Prague to show you how convenient mobile live blogging can be.
1st Step: Install the Reporter App
The first step is to install the Reporter App on the mobile device you want to work from. Search for “Live Blog Reporter” in the iOS or Google Play app stores. Once you’ve got the app on your device, make sure you’re registered as a user and team member for the Live Blog you want to work on. And, if you need a Live Blog instance, visit liveblog.pro to try Live Blog for free.
Once your account is up and running, the next step is to log into the app. On the app’s home screen enter the URL of your Live Blog instance, your username, and your password. Now, locate the blog you want to work on from your organisation’s Blog List. You can only work on blog’s that are bolded; if a name is greyed out it means you don’t have access.
For this tutorial we’ll walk you through how to post images and videos shot from your device to your Live Blog timeline. We’re using images and videos that we took at a huge protest in Prague’s Letna Park in November 2019.
Step 2: Upload an image along with text
When you log into your Live Blog, you’ll be directed to the Editor pane by default. To post an image along with our text, click the “Image” icon on the app’s menu bar. Then select an image from your device’s gallery. Add a description and author information. Finally, save your work by clicking the “check mark” in the upper right-hand corner of the Editor window.
Adding an image
Step 3: Add additional elements
If you want to add additional elements to the post – whether it’s text, images, or videos – click the “plus” sign below the image you just upload.
Adding additional elements
Once you’re happy with your post, you can either save it as a “Draft” – a helpful option if you are in an area with weak Internet connectivity – “Submit” it for editorial approval based on your organisation’s workflow, or “Publish” it directly to your Live Blog’s timeline. To see your post in its published form, click the “Timeline” tab at the top of the app. Or visit your blog on the Web.
You can also “Delete,” “Unpublish” or “Edit” a post simply by clicking on it from the “Timeline” view within the App.
Delete, unpublish or edit
And there you have it. Live blogging on the go is as easy as it’s ever been with the Live Blog Reporter App. For more Live Blog tutorials, check out our YouTube channel or visit us at liveblog.pro.
January 9, 2020
Monetise Your Live Blog With Ads and Affiliate Deals
TIPS AND TRICKS
Monetise Your Live Blog With Ads and Affiliate Deals
by Todd Jatras | Jan. 9, 2020
Today’s most successful news organisations rely on an ever-growing arsenal of digital tools to attract readers and keep them engaged. Live blogging has been around for a while, but is increasingly becoming a key component for news sites in the battle to retain and grow audiences. A blogging platform such as our Live Blog offers a dynamic, feature-rich format that is ideal for covering niche topics or using it to break news then update the story with real-time coverage as events unfold.
There are numerous ways that a well-designed blogging strategy can contribute to the overall health of a site’s news ecosystem, but today we will focus on boosting the bottom line by learning to monetise your blog via ads and affiliate deals.
As a cloud-based, open-source editorial tool that can be embedded in any website, Live Blog offers a host of features such as custom design themes, syndication tools, a mobile app and the ability to easily integrate rich multimedia formats and social media posts into an editorial timeline. Live Blog is highly flexible and scalable, and is used not only by some of the world’s leading news agencies, but also by smaller, independent publishers and even one-person operations. For stories that require frequent updating (elections, sports, conferences, and unexpected events such as natural catastrophes or political uprisings), you’d be hard-pressed to beat its live coverage capabilities. There are also great opportunities to make money from a live blog. You can demo Live Blog for free, and find detailed answers to any questions you may have in our helpdesk.
Complete Control Over Ads on Your Blog
Live Blog supports multiple types of advertising, giving you a great degree of control over what ads appear on your blog. Our advertising manager allows you to build your own native ads and place them within your blog as you see fit. Instead of being tied to third-party ad providers such as Google AdSense or Doubleclick, where you have little control over ads and their placement, these native ads are easy to archive, schedule and populate on a user’s various timelines. Of course, remote ads from those third-party providers can also be thrown into the mix by entering the ad’s code snippet. This gives you the best of both worlds when it comes to ads.
Live blogging also lends itself particularly well to specialised, niche topics, which opens many unique possibilities for native ad selling. To use one example, if one of your blogs is sports related, you could pitch the leagues you cover, sporting goods stores, apparel and equipment manufacturers or even radio and TV networks that broadcast relevant events. Advertisers crave highly targeted audiences and are willing to pay a premium to reach them. With Live Blog you are free to pursue an almost unlimited world of profit opportunity there. Of course, selling ads is a lot of work and requires constant relationship building and maintenance. But it’s a crucial option to have, and it’s also nice to have the option of third-party ads as a fall-back position as you get started.
Affiliate Marketing Pays Dividends
Affiliate marketing is another proven revenue generator, and is practically tailor-made for blogging. Whether your blog’s focus is electronics, fashion, music, books, or many other products, there is a great opportunity to embed affiliate links and promo codes in your product features and receive a commission when a reader clicks through and buys.
Amazon.com is without a doubt the biggest player, and their program lets you promote any of the more than 600 million items on their platform. Some companies have their own affiliate programs and can be approached individually, but the most common approach is to use an affiliate network. Awin and Webgains are two of the majors. They act as intermediaries, connecting companies and affiliates and can save you a lot of time finding the right brand partnerships.
One thing’s for certain, well-produced blogs that thoroughly cover niche topics attract dedicated readers who will keep returning in search of the latest news and reviews of the products they are passionate about. They are also the most likely to read a positive review and decide to purchase on the spot. So, be sure to set up and include affiliate links in your reviews to give your most loyal readers that option.
Combine the Two and Watch Your Revenues Grow
Done together, these two strategies should provide a significant boost for your blog’s bottom line. Of the two, it’s far easier to set up an affiliate program. It can basically be done in a day. And don’t forget, it should also be done retroactively, so all those stellar reviews you’ve already produced can be quickly linked to get the commissions rolling in. As far as advertising goes, this can be a fun-but-time-consuming pursuit, but a creative one that will definitely pay off with persistence and hard work.
October 22, 2019
Live Blogging a Cultural Event with Live Blog
Live Blogging a Cultural Event with Live Blog
by Todd Jatras | October 22, 2019
Live blogging is an excellent way to provide your readers with robust, real-time coverage of cultural events, making use of dynamic elements that give readers the sense that they are live, in-person, with the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of the actual event.
Cultural events take place every day, in all corners of the world; day in, day out, there’s a full slate of festivals, sporting events, conferences, exhibitions, concerts, and more, drawing in the crowds. But there’s also a potentially large online audience, eager for the latest news, updates and experiences that give the feeling of actually being in attendance.
Whether it’s a mega-event like Burning Man or something more along the lines of a local art fair, one of the best ways to produce this kind of “experience” coverage, and assure that interested readers find it, is by blogging.
Traditional formats like the standard newspaper article fall short when it comes to conveying that sense of being there. A digital-native tool like our Live Blog, however, with its multimedia capabilities (photo galleries, video and social media post embeds) and flexibility opens up new dimensions to capture the richness of any experience.
To give you a sense of this, we set out to live blog an arts event ourselves. The Signal Festival is an annual showcase of light-based art and new media works held every autumn in Prague.
September 4, 2018
Live Blogging an American Football Game
Live Blogging an American Football Game
by Clare Charlesworth | September 5, 2018
Live blogging American football games has become increasingly popular, with many regional news outlets live blogging the games throughout the season and several larger international outlets having a go at live blogging the Super Bowl to meet the growing demand for online coverage from an international audience.
Live blogs can be perfect for many different types of football fans who want to keep up to date; the varied post types, such as the play-by-play commentary feature, offer detailed information that could come in handy for fans who are into Fantasy Football, while the different ways of organising a live blog can be helpful for readers who might want to filter your blog so that they read only the game’s highlights. All of this, and much more, make live blogs an ideal medium for covering a football game. So put on your favourite team’s jersey and read on to learn more tips on how to make your live coverage of the next big game clear, entertaining and informative for your readers.
Keeping score
Obviously, keeping track of the score is paramount to covering any sporting event. Live Blog’s scorecard allows for the score to be clearly presented, and its additional features also allow for more detailed information on the score to be included. Many of your readers might appreciate the teams’ overall record so far in the season, and a breakdown of the score for each quarter – this information can be added in the ‘Halftime Results’ editor box and can be easily updated as the game progresses.
Clearly present the game’s score to your audience.
Clearly present the game’s score to your audience.
The scorecard feature also allows for a background image and images representing the different teams to be included. If your coverage has a sponsor and you’re looking for a way to showcase them on your blog, you may want to consider using the background image as a place to promote their product or brand.
Use the scorecard’s background image as a place to showcase your sponsor.
Shake up your coverage
As we’ve banged on about in previous blog posts, a live blog solely consisting of text risks readers glossing over important information and, often, leaving for more dynamic coverage being offered elsewhere. Images, videos and social media posts can all help to break up large chunks of text and make your coverage more interesting.
Additionally, make the most of Live Blog’s custom post types when displaying game data. Reporting on the time of possession between the two teams just in text probably won’t make as much of an impact as displaying it in a chart or percentage might, using Live Blog’s Statistics in Charts and Statistics in Percentages post types, which can be found on our GitHub, ready to be copied and pasted into Live Blog’s Free Types Manager. Potential statistics to represent in visual form could include time of possession, number of 1st downs, passing yardage, yards per play and turnovers.
Display important game stats with Live Blog’s custom post types.
If you’d like for your live blog to provide readers with an extremely detailed account of the game, consider using Live Blog’s play-by-play commentary post type, which can also be found on our GitHub. With an easy template/form for you to fill out, consisting of the minute the action took place and a box for a textual description, readers can be kept well-informed on the intricacies of the game. The play-by-play commentary feature can be great to use if you think that some of your readers might be in a fantasy football league, as they’ll want a well-detailed breakdown of the game for their picks that week.
Additionally, if you wanted to report on a specific aspect of the game but couldn’t find an existing custom post type that met your needs exactly, you could create your own or adapt an existing one with some basic HTML knowledge and Live Blog’s Free Types Manager – perhaps something like a table that allowed your readers to more easily compare the teams’ major players and their stats.
Structure your live blog’s timeline
With the many different post types and creative ways of presenting information in Live Blog, you may be worried that key moments of the game, like touchdowns, field goals and safeties, might be missed by the reader. Structuring your feed will also be helpful to followers who might be reading your coverage after the game takes place, instead of following it live, as a way to become quickly informed on the game highlights.
With Live Blog’s Pin and Highlight features, you can organise your live feed so that important information is easily distinguishable. Pinning a post will ensure that it shows up first on your timeline, making it the first thing a reader sees. Posts that are highlighted will have their background colour changed, which might help readers to identify posts about change of possession or long yardage plays, for example. Readers can also choose to filter the timeline by highlighted posts – perfect for those who want to see only the most important moments of the game.
Pin and highlight important posts.
Readers can also choose the order in which they read your coverage with the ‘Editorial’, ‘Newest first’ and ‘Oldest first’ options. The ‘Oldest first’ option may be useful for those reading your blog post-game, as it will give them a comprehensive report on the game as it happened.
Facilitating a second screen experience with Live Blog’s AMP theme
For many live television events, ‘second screen experiences’ have become more and more common for viewers. A second screen experience consists of a person watching an event on TV while also using another device, usually their phone, to discuss or find out additional information about the event they are watching on TV.
Many of your readers will be using your live blog as a space to enjoy a second screen experience when simultaneously watching the game on TV. To make their second screen experience as enjoyable as possible, you may want to consider publishing your live blog under Live Blog’s AMP theme. Offering a much faster loading time on mobile devices than Live Blog’s Classic or Default SEO themes, the AMP theme is designed to offer an enhanced website and live blogging experience for those following your coverage on their phones.
For many, sharing opinions on the latest moment of the game and engaging with fellow fans is an important part of a second screen experience. Live Blog’s user commenting feature works in the AMP theme, meaning that users can engage with your coverage directly from their phones by submitting comments for you to include in your blog.
Encourage your readers to engage with your content with the user comment feature.
Both remote and native ads are also configurable in the AMP theme, meaning that readers can engage with your ads on their phones as well as laptops. If you need any help including your AMP-compatible live blog in your AMP page, have a read of our wiki or get in touch with us directly – we’re always happy to help.
This video is made using InVideo.io
July 4, 2018
Live Blogging Pro Tips: Using the Scorecard Feature
Live Blogging Pro Tips: Using the Scorecard Feature
by Thomas Moran | July 2, 2018
Naturally, large football events, like the FIFA World Cup, Champions League and various national matches, see a high demand for online coverage. Covering a match with a live blog offers the opportunity to keep track of every moment, from possession to substitution and formation. But of course, the most pressing updates to keep on top of will be goals scored.
That’s where Live Blog’s Scorecard feature can help. Not only does it allow for key information on the score to be displayed in a visually appealing way, additional points, such as who scored and in what minute of the game, are also easy to include. And the Scorecard feature isn’t limited to just covering football matches either – it’s also a valuable tool for covering other sports such as ice hockey and basketball.
To help you get the most out of Live Blog’s Scorecard feature, we’ve made a short screencast:
If you’re looking for more tips on covering football matches, have a read of our guide on live blogging the FIFA World Cup.
June 25, 2018
7 Tips for Live Blogging Your Running Event
7 Tips for Live Blogging Your Running Event
by Gideon Lehmann | June 25, 2018
From personal experience, I know there’s nothing more exciting than being part of a large running event. From kids high-fiving runners to live music being performed at different points of the race and volunteers handing out water and snacks, there’s always something taking place.
As the organiser of a running event, you’ll want to capture these moments and be able to update your runners with important information. You’ll also need to keep spectators well-informed once the race begins. A live blog will allow you to publish all your updates in one place, ensuring that readers can easily keep up-to-date with the race.
To help you get started, we’ve prepared seven tips that will help you get the most out of live blogging your race day.
This video is made using InVideo.io
#1 Prepare coverage before your running event begins
By having content prepared before the race begins, you’ll have enough time during the event to focus on more pressing updates. Content to create beforehand could include:
- Posts detailing the runners’ profiles
- Interesting facts about the race and its history
- A list of things to see along the race course (monuments, buildings, bridges, etc.)
That way, even during some of the less exciting moments in the race, you’ll always have something to publish.
Posts like profiles on talented runners can be prepared well in advance and saved in Live Blog’s Drafts or Contributions sections for when you need them.
#2 Engage your readers
By introducing a social media hashtag, such as #LondonMarathon, before your running event takes place, you’ll be able to find relevant social media posts to include in your live blog. You can further increase reader engagement with your coverage by using Live Blog’s user commenting feature, which allows you to collect, moderate and publish your readers’ comments.
Readers can submit comments to your live coverage.
#3 Organise your live blog’s timeline
Giving your live coverage a clear structure will help your readers keep track of important updates and help latecomers to your coverage get quickly up to speed. Pinning a post will mean that it stays at the very top of your live blog’s timeline, ensuring that it is the first thing a reader sees. Highlighting posts that contain important pieces of information, such as who is leading at the halfway mark, allows for readers who are pressed for time to quickly scan through your live blog.
Ensure readers get important information by pinning and highlighting posts.
#4 Make your data stand out
To help you cover a wide variety of events, Live Blog has several post types available, including scorecards, play-by-play commentary and the presentation of statistics in charts and graphs. You don’t even have to be limited to the existing post types either, as it’s easy to create your own with Live Blog’s freetype feature.
When live blogging the International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) World Championships in 2017, AthleticsAfrica created a custom post type that allowed them to display small medals next to the winners of a race, which helped to improve the look and feel of their page. The medal post type is now a permanent post type on Live Blog so others can also display the results of the race in this visually appealing way.
The medal post type is a simple, yet informative, way of displaying the race results.
To show you just how easy it is to create a specific post type for your running event, I created a custom post type using Live Blog’s freetype feature (seen in the image below). I wanted to call attention to some of the important facts and figures of the running event, so I made a post type that would allow me to make certain parts of my text bold and larger.
Create your own post types with Live Blog’s freetype feature.
#5 Involve your sponsors
Style your live blog according to your sponsors’ corporate identity and branding. This can be done by featuring their logo prominently on your blog and by including ads for their services in your coverage. You may also want to mention your sponsors in prepared posts that concern key moments in the race – perhaps in the lead up to announcing the winners, or if a new national or world record has been set.
Style your live blog with your sponsor’s colour scheme in mind.
#6 Share customised coverage
To reach a wider audience, consider sharing your live coverage with media partners and sponsors. With Live Blog’s output channels, you can customise the look and feel of your live blog for every outlet that you choose to share it with. This means that the same content can be shared on multiple channels, each with a different design.
#7 Turn your live coverage into a multimedia report
While during the race you’ll want the latest updates to come up first in the reader’s timeline, after the event ends you may want to change the default order so that the reader sees the oldest posts first. By doing so, the reader will be able to read the live blog as a multimedia report on the whole event.
June 18, 2018
Live Blogging Pro Tips: Adding Animated GIFs and Unicode Icons to your Live Blog
Live Blogging Pro Tips: Adding Animated GIFs and Unicode Icons to your Live Blog
by Thomas Moran | June 18, 2018
We recently teamed up with the Eurovision Song Contest to help them create an entertaining live blog that provided music fans with updates and behind-the-scenes content throughout the competition. One way in which Eurovision kept their readers engaged with their live blog was by including animated GIFs and Unicode icons (⛵✈ ☂ ☕ ♫) in their coverage.
To help you enrich your live blog with Unicode icons and animated GIFs, and make your own coverage as eye-catching as Eurovision’s, we’ve created a screencast that shows you just how easy it is to include both in Live Blog.
June 6, 2018
Live Blogging the FIFA World Cup: a Game Plan
Live Blogging the FIFA World Cup: a Game Plan
by Clare Charlesworth | June 06, 2018
From 14 June to 15 July, 32 international football teams will compete in the hopes of being this year’s FIFA World Cup champion. The World Cup is one of the most popular sporting events in the world, with a whopping 1 billion people watching the 2014 final between Argentina and Germany. But naturally, these viewers weren’t just watching on traditional media. An estimated 280 million people watched matches either on a mobile device or online over the course of the event. In FIFA’s words, it’s a clear sign that ‘more and more fans are embracing new technology for sports content’.
One of the technological platforms that many are turning to for online coverage are live blogs, which are an excellent fit for covering sporting events. Have an update on Neymar’s injury? Write a post and have it up on your live blog in seconds. Receiving insider updates from an account on twitter? Grab them and add them with a simple embed code.
Capitalising on the high demand for online coverage of the World Cup, however, can be a daunting task for you and your live blogging team. How best should you present your content so that it is both informative and engaging? How can you make sure that your live blog stands out from other online content on this hugely popular sporting event?
Here are a couple of pointers to help you make the most of your live blog coverage of the World Cup.
#1 Warm up before the match
Match days are sure to be hectic for your blogging team. Having a clear editorial structure in place will save you valuable time when your team begins publishing content. Depending on the scale of your live blogging operation, it might be helpful to manage the different editing privileges that members of your team have. Do you want member A of your team to be able to publish their updates as soon as they finish, but for member B’s posts to be read by an editor first? Establishing this editorial workflow before the match is imperative for staying on top of everything.
Even the most passionate of football fans will begrudgingly admit that not every game is particularly exciting all of the time. At different points in your live blog coverage, such as before the match begins, in the halftime break, or at some slower points in the game, you might struggle to find content and keep your readers engaged. Researching and drafting posts on players and past matches beforehand will mean that you always have enough content to publish throughout your coverage. Live Blog’s editorial workflow structure even allows for potential posts to be stored in your live blog’s contribution section until you are ready to publish.
Store potential posts in Live Blog’s contribution section for later use.
#2 Provide a structured reading experience
With so many updates throughout the match, you may be worried about your live blog seeming chaotic at times. A football fan visiting your live blog mid-way through the match might struggle to find key moments of the game without having to read through less important posts first. Consider using a pinning feature to have the most relevant information, such as the score of the match, come up first in your live blog’s timeline. Ensure that other interesting updates, such as a commentary on a goal scored, can be distinguished by highlighting the post.
Highlight important posts to help readers find them easily.
#3 Bring your coverage to life
It can become all too easy for readers to simply gloss over your content if it consists solely of text. Including visual posts, like images and videos of match highlights, will make your live blog’s timeline more dynamic. Additionally, keep an eye on different social media channels for relevant posts to include. With Live Blog, incorporating different forms of multimedia into coverage is simple and intuitive, saving time and effort in high-pressure situations.
Similarly, consider the different methods through which you could represent live data. Conveying complex figures about ball possessions just through text probably won’t resonate as much with readers as a graphic element might. Opt to include charts and percentages that represent the game’s statistics, such as corner kicks, fouls and bookings, visually.
Represent the game’s statistics through charts and graphs.
Including a scorecard is an excellent way to represent the most important information about the match. As described in our tips on how to cover the Champions League, scorecards provide readers with the most up-to-date score of the game in an easily understandable manner. Live Blog’s scorecards are easy to update and can also provide more detailed information, such as who scored and in what minute of the game.
Additionally, engage your readers by including a user comment feature, which allows for editors to incorporate reader comments into your live blog’s timeline. By including this feature, you’ll be able to showcase different opinions on how the match is going while also increasing reader participation with your live blog.
Live Blog’s user commenting feature allows for editors to further engage their readers.
#4 Monetise your live blog
Now that you know how to make your coverage of the World Cup more engaging, why not monetise your live blog by including ads from third-party providers or even ones you’ve made yourself? Get in touch with nearby businesses (a local brewery, for example) and ask them to sponsor your coverage in exchange for the inclusion of their ads in your live blog’s timeline.
Monetise your coverage of the World Cup by including ads in your live blog’s timeline.
May 30, 2018
The Highly-Anticipated Events You Should Live Blog this Summer
The Highly-Anticipated Events You Should Live Blog this Summer
by Clare Charlesworth | May 30, 2018
From international sporting competitions to decisive elections, there are many highly anticipated events taking place this summer. Some of the events will be over in a flash, making a live blog’s ability to produce real-time updates an asset. Others, such as the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, will take place over several weeks and are perhaps more suited to a ‘slow blog’, which offers updates on a topic over longer periods of time.
To help you keep track of everything going on this summer, we’ve compiled a list of diverse, live-blog-worthy events. If you’d prefer to see this list in a different format, click here to download it as an Excel calendar.
Arts & Culture
Comic-Con (19 – 22 July)
Held in San Diego but followed eagerly by many all over the world, Comic-Con aims to promote an appreciation of comics and pop culture. In recent years, the four-day event has seen attendance exceeding 130,000 and even holds the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest annual comic and pop culture festival.
Edinburgh Fringe Festival (3 – 27 August)
From jazz concerts to stand-up comedy to Rocky Horror performances, there’s no shortage of things to live blog about at the largest performing arts festival in the world.
Eurovision Young Musicians (18, 19 & 23 August)
Part of the Eurovision Family of Events, this music competition consists of performances by young musicians from 18 European countries. If you’re looking for a blueprint, the Eurovision Song Contest recently teamed up with Live Blog to produce an engaging live blog for fans all over the world.
Venice Film Festival (29 August – 8 September)
Established in 1932, this year’s Venice Film Festival will celebrate its 75th edition. Being one of the most prestigious film festivals in the world, many eagerly look forward to finding out who the winners of each category are.
Sports
FIFA World Cup (14 June – 15 July)
Every four years the FIFA World Cup takes place, captivating soccer fans all over the world. As is the case for many other sporting competitions taking place in the summer of 2018, Live Blog’s free sports theme is well-suited to covering the FIFA World Cup, with the theme including play-by-play commentary, scorecards and the production of statistics in both charts and percentages.
2018 Wimbledon Championships (2 – 15 July)
This prestigious tennis championship will take place over the course of two weeks at the beginning of July. The BBC has reported that for last year’s Championships it had 24.1 million stream requests via BBC iPlayer and BBC Sport – just one indication of the large demand for online access to coverage of the tennis matches.
Tour de France (7 – 29 July)
First organised in 1903, this multi-stage race takes its cyclists, and the many viewers who follow passionately from home, all over the French countryside.
Formula One, British Grand Prix (5 – 8 July)
This year will be Silverstone’s 70th anniversary as host of Formula One’s British Grand Prix. To celebrate this milestone, throughout the weekend, Silverstone will also have numerous concerts and other entertainment for racing fans to enjoy.
Athletics World Cup (14 – 15 July)
This year’s Athletics World Cup will be held in London and will see eight of the world’s best athletic nations competing against each other for the Athletics World Cup trophy and the $2 million prize that comes with it. While lasting only two days, the Athletics World Cup will consist of 34 track and field events with 102 individual medals also being up for grabs.
European Championships (2 – 12 August)
This will be the first ever European Championships: a multi-sporting event held in both Glasgow and Berlin over eleven days. Organisers expect there is a potential television audience of 1.03 billion people, with additional millions looking for other digital platforms to receive updates.
18th Asian Games (18 August – 2 September)
Also known as the Asiad, the Asian Games is the second largest multi-sport competition after the Olympics. Alongside more “typical” sports, this year’s competition will see eSports being played for the first time, with plans for it to become an official medal sport at the 19th Asian Games in 2022.
Political Events
Summits
44th G7 Summit (8 – 9 June)
To be held in Canada this year, the G7 Summit brings together world leaders from France, Germany, Japan, Italy, the UK, the US and Canada to discuss important issues currently at play in the world.
US – North Korea Summit in Singapore (12 June)
President Donald Trump and the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, are set to meet in Singapore for a historic summit on 12 June. Since the details of this meeting seem to change every day, the summit is well suited to live blog coverage as they offer bloggers a simple, fast updating tool, and readers an easy-to-follow stream of information concerning an important event.
Elections
There are many elections scheduled to take place this summer, the speculated outcomes of which change almost daily. Due to the unpredictable nature of these elections and the ever-changing circumstances surrounding them, live blogs are an ideal match for coverage. Live blogs are able to offer readers real-time updates as the results become available through a wide range of multimedia, including different infographics showing the results of the elections.
For tips on how to successfully live blog an election, have a read of our blog post.
Some of the many elections taking place include:
- Colombia’s Presidential Election (With the first round on 27 May producing no clear majority, Colombia’s presidential election moves into a runoff with the second round taking place on 17 June.)
- Mexico’s General Election (1 July)
- Pakistan’s General Election (25 July)
- Sweden’s General Election (9 September)
- US 2018 Midterms (6 November)
While taking place in autumn, there’s no need to limit your live blog coverage of the US 2018 Midterms to just election night. Many news organisations have begun to use Live Blog as a slow blog, which allows for coverage of a specific topic over longer periods of time.
Conferences
A conference might not be the first thing that springs to mind when considering what events might suit live blog coverage. However, there are many advantages that come with putting the two together. Covering a conference with a live blog can increase audience participation and social media coverage of your event, and by archiving your blog, you’ll have an easy-to-read, comprehensive document detailing the conference. To find out other ways in which live blogs can be used to cover conferences, be sure to read our post.
With so many different conferences taking place, we’ve whittled it down to a couple focusing on journalism and media that you might find particularly interesting:
The GEN Summit 2018 (30 May – 1 June)
This year’s Global Editors Network (GEN) summit will take place in Lisbon, Portugal, with the overall theme of this widely attended meeting being ‘Towards the Augmented Newsroom’. For a better understanding of the GEN summit, see our interview with GEN CEO, Bertrand Pecquerie.
World News Media Conference (6 – 8 June)
Featuring many different speakers, including prominent publishers, chief editors and CEOs of different media organisations, the World News Media Conference is held annually to discuss the sustainability of the media industry and media freedom. This year’s conference will be held in Estoril, Cascais, Portugal.
Global Media Forum (11 – 13 June)
‘Global inequalities’ is this year’s theme for Deutsche Welle’s Global Media Forum, an international media conference that brings together a wide range of fields including journalism, politics and academia to discuss pertinent issues facing journalism today.
Science
World Science Festival (29 May – 3 June)
Bringing together both the general public and some of the brightest scientific minds, the 11th World Science Festival aims to make science more accessible by taking it out of the lab and placing it into ‘the streets, parks, museums, galleries and premier performing arts venues of New York City and beyond’.
NASA (Launch Window: 31 July – 19 August)
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is scheduled to be launched this summer. Travelling through the sun’s atmosphere, this will be the closest contact any spacecraft has made with a star.
What events are you planning on live blogging this summer? Let us know by using the hashtag #liveblogthissummer
Click here to download this list as an Excel calendar.
April 25, 2018
Top 6 Tips on How to Live Blog Your Next Conference
Top 6 Tips on How to Live Blog Your Next Conference
by Gideon Lehmann | Apr 25, 2018
Here is the good news before you start: Covering your conference with Live Blog is a natural fit. Expect increased user engagement, great social media coverage and easy event-documentation coming out of it. All things you probably already have to take care of but with Live Blog it will be easy to do with just one tool. And with the tips below, we hope your first post will be even easier.
#1 Choose your target audience
With Live Blog you provide minute-by-minute updates of your event to your audience. Now let’s take a moment to think about your target audiences. Live Blog can perfectly be used for both internal and external communication: people not attending the conference can follow the discussions and keynotes on the conference website and even participate by commenting on the live coverage. But apart from this rather classic use-case, Live Blog can also play a good role in engaging the participants of the conference itself. Screen your Live Blog right into the conference room and notice how the visibility of the key arguments to the participants has a positive effect on the discussion itself.
#2 Build a team
Do you have someone in the team taking care of social media and someone doing press relations or dealing with the website? Here you go! Live Blog will actually save them time to reach their goals and have a better audience engagement and outreach. However, live blogging might be a new tool in your communication toolset and building a live blogging team with clear responsibilities is key to a successful live coverage of your event. No matter if there is only one person taking care of the live reporting, a team or if you decide to turn your conference participants into reporters – make sure to clearly assign your team members to the following roles:
- Who is responsible for the blog as a publication?
- Who can publish to the timeline and who is just contributing?
- Who takes care of the social media coverage and is curating the reader comments?
- Once you’ve done that, your coverage will be a smooth operation and a great success!
#3 Prepare well
Live is live and when things are moving forward time is what matters and you will feel great if you can rely on a well-prepared coverage. Here are some suggestions on what you might typically need:
- Ahead of an event set up your Twitter search (and other social media channels) to monitor relevant accounts and hashtags. You can also prepare your first social media posts based on the results of your research and schedule them to be published during the coverage.
- Prepare posts introducing the speakers of your conference. At the beginning of a session keep it at hand and publish it.
- Store your images in a folder available to everyone
- In case your blog is sponsored by a media partner or other type of sponsor – make sure to set up a branded blog and prepare sponsored posts.
#4 Εngage your audience
Studies show that the likelihood of user engagement significantly rises during live events. As a conference organiser, you know this through tracking the trend of your conference hashtag during your event. Live Blog is your ideal partner here because you can both, highlight the activities in the social media by embedding them into your live coverage and make use of the comments feature of Live Blog, curate incoming user messages as well as make them part of your coverage. Another specific aspect, when using Live Blog for conferences, is that you can screen the Live Blog timeline in real time to the conference participants and make them feel particularly engaged seeing their quotes, tweets or comments appearing “big” on the screen.
M100 conference
#5 Publish internally and externally
A Live Blog is normally used to report to an audience that is not present at an event, in (almost) real time about what exactly is happening there. This way you can engage people who were not able to attend the conference, improve the impact of the conference’s outcome and win new participants for your future events – so far so good. But with a Live Blog, you can also reach out to the participants of a conference directly and highlight the importance of their input by screening it on a big screen. This may even have a moderating effect on ongoing discussions in a conference panel: Live Blog sums up the discussion in a way that helps to avoid endless repetitions of arguments already made and shared.
#6 Archive your blog, document your event
Many conference organisers have to actually document the conference output and impact in order to report to their sponsors or initiators. Live Blog will help you with it and save a lot of time. If you cover a conference with a Live Blog you can archive the blog by saving it with the first post on top, emphasizing certain posts as highlights and pin a summary to it on top of the timeline. This way your live coverage becomes a Multimedia documentation of the event and by making use of the analytics feature of Live Blog you can even prove the impact by tracking and sharing the number of visitors on each and every blog.
Extra tip – Set up sponsored blogs
Live Blog is not only your partner when it comes to live coverages – it will also help you to monetize your efforts. In case you would like to offer an attractive package to your sponsors – Live Blog allows you to create branded versions of a blog. All you need to do is to create a branded output channel and apply the logo and corporate color of your sponsor to your blog. How many sponsors do you have – with Live Blog you can create as many branded versions of the blog as is needed for your business. Happy live blogging!