Real-time reporting is a lovely, crazy beast: in addition to worrying about the scandal that just broke, you need to ensure that your reporter’s copy is flawless, your photographer’s pics are properly cropped and your entire team is working as efficiently as possible.
And if anyone knows just how crazy it can get, it’s the members of the ScribbleLive digital journalism department! In fact, we’re constantly trying to think of ways to make real-time storytelling easier for our clients. Sometimes we accomplish this by asking our team of developers to create new features for the platform; other times, we need to think outside of the box. To this end, we often make use of an idea called a ‘raw feed’.
At its most basic, a raw feed is a dummy event that you can dump posts into without them being published for your readers to see. You can fiddle, tweak and perfect the content before pulling it out of the raw feed and into a live event on your website. You can create one to act as an editorial safety net, edit posts before they go live, pre-package posts that can easily be pulled in and customize coverage you’re picking up from syndication.
Because raw feeds are incredibly helpful and often used, we’ve developed some instructions and scenarios on how they can be incorporated into your coverage. The information below is nowhere near exhaustive but meant to give you an idea of the power of this technique.
If you’d like to learn more, take our advanced ScribbleU course. And if you’ve used raw feeds in an new and innovative way not showcased here, let us know! (more…)
