by Manolis Zografakis |  October 12, 2022

Engaging audiences with real-time involvement through live blogging improves a user’s experience and yields many other benefits for a news business, including expanded reach and higher profits. Nowadays, online users have developed a certain expectation regarding the speed with which they may access and enjoy content online. They are interested in current events as they are happening, which is why more and more people are starting to consume content through live blogs.

Live blogging platforms offer an alternate communication method with a news company’s target market through live, interactive content. They allow for content to be compiled from multiple sources rather than just one. Simply put, journalists and editors using live blogging software such as Live Blog Pro gather data from several sources and put it together using social media inputs and photos.

A strategy that includes posting updates regularly, covering events as they happen, or reporting breaking news in real-time would benefit significantly from a Live Blog solution. Since live blogs provide readers with breaking news and are easy to navigate, they are also suitable for readers to consume news while on the go, because the content is easily digestible in small chunks.

Live blogging has a huge potential to pique online news readers’ interest in current affairs coverage and encourage them to take action.

What Is Live Blogging?

Like traditional blogs, live blogging focuses primarily on textual documentation of events. As its name implies, live blogging involves publishing simultaneously  as an ongoing event, updating the coverage as things happen. Think of a live blog as a rolling text that constantly updates its viewers.

A live blog combines several media types and data feeds to produce information in real time. If your plan involves making frequent updates, covering live events, or reporting breaking news, a live blog solution is precisely what you need. Have a look at these live blog examples.There are many reasons why live blogging is the present and future of multimedia client involvement in all fields, from journalism to politics. Let’s take a look at a few of them.

13 Benefits of Live Blogging for the New Business

Live blogging is used by news organisations for several purposes, including expanding their audience, making the news-gathering process more open and accessible, boosting reader participation, and even bringing in extra money via blog syndication.

1. Increase Customer Engagement

Your audience will be exposed to a new mode of real time interaction and information dissemination when you implement live blogging. To get your audience to care about your organisation and content, having features like in-feed comments and live streaming of events is essential.

2. Maximise Your Return on Investment

Live blogs, if managed properly, have the potential to generate a return on investment that is unmatched by most other channels. From having a major sponsor of the live blog to having multiple ads showing up throughout the feed, the commercial advantages of a live blog are many. Also, remember that a live blog can be a “living” blog that is continuously updated (for example, live blogs about Covid have been updated for nearly three years). The potential for additional content is increased with each new live event.

3. Develop User Interaction

Live blogs are a great way to get your news audience involved since they are lively and dynamic. Users can engage with your live blog in several ways, including asking questions, providing feedback, or retweeting posts.

4. Provide Exclusive Content

Providing users with information  they can’t get elsewhere is a noble goal, and live blogging exclusive content is a fantastic approach to achieving it. Ways to do this range from interviews to collaborations to exclusive coverages, and each can be implemented in various ways.

5. Widen Your Audience

Through the SEO-optimised themes of Live Blog Pro, you can attract more organic readers to your blog. There are two main ways to expand your readership: By encouraging people to chat about your live blog content, and by having them suggest your news business to others they think might enjoy reading what you report.

6. Stay Ahead of the Competition With Advance Planning

You may set yourself apart from the competition by planning your live blog in advance. There are plenty of events that you could start blogging before they happen, such as elections, conferences, and sports matches. With Live Blog’s post scheduling functionality, you can even write content ahead of time and set it to be published at any time in the future.

7. Gain Valuable Insights

Providing coverage of an event is only one aspect of live blogging. Remember that you’ll need a plan for the times before, during, and after your coverage is broadcast. You can learn a lot about your audience and what they need from you if you take the time to observe and listen to how they respond to your coverage.

8. Live Blog On The Go

With live blogging, timing is everything. Providing live coverage loses its value and importance if it is not posted immediately. Thankfully, the Live Blog Reporter app lets your reporters contribute content directly from their mobile phones.

9. Be Accessible

Live blogging can be adapted to the style of your news organisation while still being user-friendly and mobile-friendly. In addition, its speed and user-friendliness will provide the impression that you are more accessible to your audience.

10. Establish Authority

Your news organisation may establish credibility by providing readers with timely, relevant content that is addressed consistently and engagingly. If visitors to your live blog feel like they’ve learned something new, they’ll be more likely to come back for updates in the future.

11. Give Context

In liveblogging, the tale you convey will be highly potent because of how much emphasis you put on context. When reporting news, sometimes all you need to do is set the scene for your viewers or readers. Live blogging gives you an excellent opportunity to use narrative to connect with your audience on an emotional level.

12. Make the News More Exciting To Read

Many people ignore articles that don’t make them feel like they’re part of the action. Live blogging provides the opposite, letting readers engage with in-the-moment news coverage.

13. Maximise The Efficiency Of The Editorial Process

Today’s fast-paced world emphasises the importance of maximising efficiency wherever possible. Live Blog streamlines and accelerates the editorial process by automatically mining content from various sources.

Transform Your News Business With Live Blogging

With all this theoretical knowledge about the benefits of live blogging at your disposal, it’s time to put it into practice and learn how to live blog. Get ready to interact with your readers, share content, and build your reputation as a news industry leader.

by Manolis Zografakis |  September 20, 2022

The popularity of live blogs for scheduled events such as elections, breaking news, sporting events, and product launches is increasing, and journalists need to write and plan content ahead of time. With Live Blog’s post scheduling functionality, editors can create and schedule live blogs in advance and prepare content that can be scheduled for publication at any time in the future.

Although 2023 is just a few months away, there are still some important events that are ideal for live coverage this year. From elections to sports events, we’ve selected six of the most important events of the last quarter of 2022 worth live blogging.

2022 FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup : 22 September – 1 October

The FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup, and international basketball tournament for women’s national teams, will be held in Sydney, Australia. 

2022 Asian Games : 23 September – 8 October

A multi-sport event held in Hangzhou, China, with 40 sports including swimming, archery, athletics, badminton, baseball and softball, basketball, and boxing.

2022 Italian general election : 25 September
The 2022 Italian general election is a snap election, scheduled for 25 September.

2022 Brazilian general election : 2 October
General elections are scheduled for 2 October in Brazil to elect the president, vice president, and members of the National Congress.

2022 G20 Bali summit : November 15–16
The 17th G20 Heads of State and Government Summit will take place 15-16 November in Bali, Indonesia.

2022 FIFA World Cup : November 20 – December 18
The quadrennial international men’s football championship also known as the World Cup, will be held in Qatar.

For inspiration on how to cover these or other live events, check out these live blogging examples. Looking to give  Live Blog a try? There’s a Live Blog demo waiting for you! Sign up for a 7 day free trial.

Happy Live Blogging!

by Aleksandar Jeličić |  September 7, 2022

Our live blogging platform comes with several different themes pre-installed, but many users would like to personalise the look and feel of their live blog at a more granular level.

This can be useful for matching the branding of the website where your live blog is embedded or simply to have more creative flexibility with your live blogging.

Theme styling from backend

Change fonts, colors and styles directly from the admin interface, without any programming knowledge. Use any font from Google Fonts with one click.
In our release 3.82.2, you will have the option to change the style of Live Blog’s default theme from within the theme settings. In particular, you will be able to change the following:

• fonts, along with their colours and sizes
• background colour of the blog
• background colour of the text for embed(s), photo, and quote post types
• maximum width of the Live Blog embed, as well as its margins and padding

This new feature will be available for Team and Corporate subscription levels, and can be found in the new “Styles” tab in Theme Settings, when you are using the Default SEO Theme.

Post scheduling

This update adds a new publishing time selector to the blog editor, which allows users to plan their content distribution with more precision than ever. In addition, we’ve added a new panel that neatly organizes your scheduled posts.

Other features

• The ability to show or hide Instagram embed descriptions
• Setting to remove timestamp in pinned posts
• Theme dropdown selector to blog creation screen
• Reinforced publishing mechanism in case of external hosting interruptions
• Strengthened syndication mechanism
• Modal dialog UI for shared posts
• New tests for hardware impact on performance and publishing
• Bug fixes and performance improvements

To see the additions and improvements in detail for this release, go to the Live Blog releases page on GitHub. Want to know more about what Live Blog can do for your news organisation? Get in touch: saas@liveblog.pro.

Looking to check out Live Blog? There is a Live Blog demo waiting for you! Sign up for a 7 day free trial.

Happy Live Blogging!

by Anna Rohleder |  October 22, 2020

This year we’ve seen live blogs become an integral part of real-time news coverage. Newsrooms are using them to provide updates on ongoing situations like the coronavirus pandemic, respond to breaking news and engage with their audiences by sharing through a variety of other media. 

The new features we have introduced in the latest release of Live Blog are intended to support all of those live blogging use cases and more. Our goal is to give reporters and editors greater flexibility, especially when working across time zones or as part of a remote team.

Plan your editorial coverage

The first new feature in this release is post scheduling. Previously, you could only publish a post at the time you wrote it — which made sense when covering breaking news. But now, as live blogs are increasingly used for scheduled events such as conferences and product launches, editors need to write content ahead of time. 

The new post scheduling feature allows you to write a post to be published at any time in the future. Here’s how it works. Create a new post as usual, select “Scheduled” in the lower right corner of the editing window, choose the date and time for publishing in the calendar and save it by pressing Schedule again. (Note: half-hour increments are set as defaults but you can type in a more precise time of your choosing). 

Once you press Schedule again, the post will go to the Scheduled posts queue, which you access by selecting the clock icon in the left menu bar. That’s where you go to edit, update or delete the post. Otherwise, there’s nothing else you need to do once the post is scheduled.

Because Live Blog is web-based, neither you nor your computer have to be online for the post to go live.

Engage your audience with Live Blog embeds

The second new key feature in release 3.8.3 is post sharing. With this feature, you can share a Live Blog post to any of the main social media networks by mousing over the sharing arrow or link button in the lower right corner of a post. Choose the icon of the service you want to share the Live Blog post to, and it will show the post you selected as the highlighted image and caption in front of the blog’s timeline. If a reader clicks on the highlighted post, it and the rest of the blog will open in a new tab or window.

Other improvements and updates in this release include:

• New content filtering functionality on the front end to allow users to filter the content according to their interests. This feature can be enabled or disabled from the theme settings screen.

• Improved ad collection rotation on Default SEO and AMP Themes
• Improved commenting feature on AMP Theme

We also fixed a few issues with video uploads to YouTube, Instagram embeds and some button behaviour on the back end.

To see the additions and improvements in detail for this release, go to the Live Blog releases page on GitHub. Want to know more about what Live Blog can do for your news organisation? Get in touch: saas@liveblog.pro.

Looking to check out Live Blog? There is a Live Blog demo waiting for you! Sign up for a 7 day free trial.

by Todd Jatras |  December 17, 2019

With the release of version 3.7, Live Blog users now have greater control over the management of their content: how they track, syndicate, and even delete it. Ease of use and seamless integration with newsroom workflows has never been better with the industry’s leading live blogging platform.

Live Blog’s new tagging functionality allows editors to apply single or multiple tags to a blog post and filter content based on those tags. Creating syndication models and output channels with new this new feature makes it easier than ever to identify and share blogs between news organisations. 

If you’ve ever hit the delete button and immediately regretted it, you need no longer worry about accidentally losing content. Deleted blogs will no longer vanish instantly, but will stay in the “trash” for three days by default. 

Live Blog 3.7 also features a new Global Settings section where you can conveniently manage all Live Blog general configurations. We’ve implemented a new setting that allows you to adjust the default privacy status for YouTube video uploads, and that can be conveniently accessed here.

To see the full rundown of 3.7 features, as well as a complete list of bug fixes and performance improvements for this release, visit Live Blog on GitHub. If you have any questions about the latest updates to Live Blog, contact us: saas@liveblog.pro