Liveblogging isn’t just about big media covering international events.
From high-school sports to weather reports, a liveblog is also a great tool to bring information to a community, keeping people informed on local happenings.
Last week, for instance, OpenFile covered a Supreme Court hearing in Halifax about the sale of St. Patrick’s Alexandra School.
The outlet used polls, pulled in Tweets from on-scene reporters and took readers’ comments, creating a dialogue with ScribbleLive while keeping Halifax informed on what was going on behind closed courtroom doors.
OpenFile’s liveblog is just one example of how local news can be covered with real-time media.
Weather reports are a popular way of using liveblogs to create localized content, and Hearst’s stations have been quite keen in this regard.
Over the past few days, WBAL has been keeping its viewers in the know with a liveblog about the Maryland snow forecast. KMBC brought readers in Kansas City information about school closures and roadway problems caused by a storm Feb. 12-14, while KCRA kept readers up-to-date on snow and rain in their Western US region last week.
Some sites opt for general catch-all liveblogs, that update readers on general local news.
The Toronto Star, for instance, runs its “Toronto Now” liveblog every day, giving people traffic and weather updates as well as neat tidbits of news – like the post pictured, which notes the death of hockey and coffee icon Tim Horton on this day in 1974.
Local sport liveblogs are also a popular way to keep readers engaged on news websites.
On Feb. 10, Lee Enterprises wrote about how two different local media outlets covered the Montana High School State Wrestling Tournament using ScribbleLive.
Over the course of two days, the Billings Gazette and the Missoulian worked as a team to cover the event through a liveblog. The outlets were able to take turns reporting, each posting to the liveblog about different parts of the tournament, creating a multi-voiced narrative that followed the story to the finals.
Introducing: ScribbleLive Discussions
Wednesday, August 29th, 2012ScribbleLive’s developers are on a roll this week. On Tuesday we unveiled a new suite of reporting tools to track your readers. Now we’re introducing Discussions.
Discussions are conversations that happen on individual liveblog posts: think threaded comments a la Facebook. Anyone can use a social login to comment on a specific post (conversations are unmoderated so anonymous logins are not allowed). All comments will appear in chronological order beneath the post on both the liveblog as well as on the post’s permalink page. This doesn’t replace our traditional reader comment box, which is still in place.
Use Discussions to:
-Promote in-depth discussions to keep your users on your site
-Ask you readers a question and collect all the responses in one place
-Promote side conversations while keeping your main liveblog on topic
-Keep opinions, suggestions, complaints and compliments attached to the posts that inspired them
Discussion comments are filtered through our language and spam filters and can be deleted by moderators, editors and administrators in the back end. You can choose which events to allow Discussion comments in, and ban anyone who is abusing their comment privilege. Detailed documentation can be found here. To have this feature enabled in your account, please contact your account rep or info@scribblelive.com.
Tags: comments, community, engagement
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