We help you get
closer to your customers.

Live blogging

As we develop our own live-blogging capability here at closerlook, we’ve been talking about best practices we can identify and employ on our clients’ behalf. Taking a look at the USA Today’s live blog of the January 24th Republican debate, and The New York Times’ live blog of the January 30th Republican debate, some interesting live-blogging practices emerge:

1. Blog bottom to top – Both The Times and USA Today move the evening’s first post progressively lower on the page. That means that those looking to catch up mid-stream (or after the fact) will have to begin at the bottom, but it also means that the most recent post appears at the top of the page each time. The corresponding experience is tailored for those watching the blog start to finish from close to the beginning. Those for whom the after-the-fact audience is of importance greater than or equal to that of the live audience may consider another tactic.

2. Begin each post with the time of its publication – Despite their national reaches, both publications couple the time with the time zone of the event being covered.

3. Limit the length of your quotes – In scanning both blogs, I noticed that no quote exceeds a single sentence in length. Many quotes are paraphrased, with only the central element in quotation marks. Here’s an example from The Times (the double quotes are mine, single quotes surround phrases quoted in the blog): “Is the Republican Party better off than it was eight years ago? No, says Mr. Romney, but he doesn’t blame Mr. Bush, he blames ‘Washington.‘”

This strikes me as sound practice. After one sentence, the risks of misquoting a speaker—with new words flying at you, and without a tape or transcript to confirm or deny what you think you heard—increase exponentially.

4. Repeat the question – Often, instead of presenting candidates’ responses as if they were part of a stump speech, bloggers for both The Times and USA Today contextualize the candidates’ words by paraphrasing the questions to which they were asked to respond. This practice of contextualization makes the blog at once more just to speakers and more useful to readers than would paraphrasing the candidates’ responses alone.

More best practices can likely be gleaned from these two live blogs. If you see any, please let us know in the comments.