by Gregory Bruno | August 4, 2021
Live Blogging Bavaria
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.