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Tech Blog – Live Blogging February 24, 2011

Posted by acusumano in : Assignments , trackback

In my summary of the fifth Briggs chapter, I mentioned how my friend Brian Chan did live blogs of sporting events at UNC Charlotte (he also did them in the past for Mason). Alas, via the trackback he saw my comment about his lame jokes and got ticked off. There is a downside to linking to everything I suppose. But I’ll take the risk and share this article about live blogging by Kevin Charman-Anderson. He says that live blogging is not just a collection of facts presented in real-time as they occur, but it allows news sites to compete with the immediacy of broadcast.

However, it remains a point of contention among journalists, and Charman-Anderson dubs the onslaught of continuous updates as “a fire hose of news”:

I really do worry that some of the aggregation that we’re doing is really difficult to navigate unless you’re a news junkie. We have to make sure that a stream of news aggregation doesn’t feel like a maddening stream of consciousness.

That almost raises the question of whether news sites should even want to compete with broadcast–it’s a matter of breaking the story versus passing on the necessities. Last night, “Survivor” host Jeff Probst tweeted a live commentary on the show as it aired on the west coast. As a fan of the show (albeit one who had to wait two hours after I finished watching the episode to follow Probst’s commentary), I loved the idea. But the execution left a lot to be desired, and hopefully if Probst repeats the experiment (he’s looking into watching with east coast viewers next week) it is handled differently. What Probst dubbed “the gobal [sic] conversation about ‘Survivor’” played out as a haphazard and not very informative review of what was on screen. An episode of “Survivor” is not a news story that needs to be catalogued in this way.

Jeff Probst, © CBS

The moral of the story? Use live blogging wisely. Know your audience and cater to what they want and need to know. Whether that’s minute-by-minute updates on a breaking news story or maybe some interaction with fans about a TV show, it’s the key to making the most of a live blog.

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