The now-ubiquitious liveblog is featured in two Fast Company articles today: “The Art of the Liveblog” includes a Q&A with Reuters social media editor Anthony DeRosa while “The Next Great Media Form” suggests that the liveblog is “The MP3 of journalism”, a logical successor to the traditional, pyramid-style text-only story.

In the Q&A, Fast Company’s Adam Penenberg (author of both articles) asks DeRosa “What’s the secret to a good live blog?” (Among his duties, DeRosa manages Reuters’ liveblogs, powered by ScribbleLive).

“You don’t want to just be a stenographer,” DeRosa says. “With these live blogs, I think people want analysis, they want a little bit more thought, something that’s going to entertain them and inform them beyond what they can usually see themselves. Because a lot of times there will be a live video feed, they’re already getting everything that some people provide in a live blog, so it’s got to be something more.”

In his second article, Pennenberg writes that “in the live blog format disparate platforms become irrelevant, and the walls between these separate silos of content simply dissolve.” He also quotes DeRosa:

“I think the traditional article is dead,” [DeRosa says]. It “should be more like a live blog, because the traditional story format lacks a lot of evidence in the form of video/photos/tweets that help corroborate what a reporter is alluding to in [his] story. Why not just have it right there in the context of the article, the same way it is in a live blog?”

Read both articles for an interesting examination of the real-time shift in traditional publishing.