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From breaking news, to highly anticipated sports matches, to major news events, live blogs meet the inherent "I need it now" buzz of time-critical events. Attract audiences to your live reporting and drive engagement with these seven must-have elements.
From breaking news, to highly anticipated sports matches, to major dates in the news calendar, live blogs perfectly meet audience demands for the “I need it now!” buzz you get from time-critical events. They have become the place to be on many sites to get that sense of being close to the action, and blog pages can easily become the highest-traffic parts of a site.
But not all live blogs are the same. There is an art to capturing the moment, and aside from having the right tools, there are key editorial practices and front-end elements to consider which add to the audience experience and make your efforts go farther.
To help you create a great live blogging experience that really captures your audience’s attention, we’ve sat down with Glide Principal Consultant and product wizard, John Salmon, to talk about the things which turn a live blog into a true audience experience. John, who works with some of the sharpest publishers in the business, helped design the natively built Glide Live Reporting toolset based on feedback from journalists at the centre of the action, and the editors and developers who need to manage teams of people, sites, and vast seas of content.
Here are John’s seven elements that are not yet standard in live blog reporting but should be - with just a little bit of how Glide makes incorporating these elements easy for our users.
Amazingly, summary panels are not yet a universal feature of live blog reporting - surprising considering they are proven to help readers get into the action quicker and give space for you to interpret events that have already occurred.
Having a bulleted summary of highlights and major moments of interest adjacent to the top of your live blog page provides readers with an easy to consume outline of your live reporting and gets readers up to speed instantly on events they may have missed.
For an optimal user experience, link summary bullet points directly to a relevant post, or even a standalone article if the moment warrants a separate story, giving a direct line to the moment “as it happened” without users needing to scroll through pages to find that particular place in the timeline.
Update the summary as frequently as needed, to add new links as they happen or update the editorial overview of what’s already happened. You can also include things as handy notes for readers to remind them when to check back, such as match kick-off times or vote deadlines.
One of the reasons summaries are not as common as they should be is the background tech: editors might have to excessively navigate around their systems to create the summary content as the live blog system doesn’t handle it. Secondary live blog systems which drop an embed of iframe on a page won’t control content outside of the embed.
Within Glide’s Live Reporting tool, a summary component is included by default in the interface for editors, alongside post creation, so there’s no need to dot around the system or fill summary information elsewhere. Simply add your summary points, link to the desired post, and save.
Example of a summary section as shown on Racing Post's live reporting coverage, 22, August, 2024
We all know that using action images and contemporary videos makes your blogs more dynamic and visually appealing by breaking up the wall of text, as well as adding context and clarity.
But more than just looking better, visual elements can have a strong positive impact on SEO metrics for improved search rankings.
What’s lesser utilised, perhaps due to technology constraints, is multimedia elements beyond standard image and videos.
To make your live blog a real audience experience, look at how to include more interactive elements such as:
Using separate systems to manage content can always introduce problems around untracked image usage, technical inconsistencies, asset-mixing, and general confusion over what has been used where. Bridging those gaps is usually a technical or workflow challenge.
Since Glide’s Live Reporting tools are part of the main CMS itself, not in a separate or standalone system, it means any media assets or files you would normally have access to and any business logic attached to them will be enforced in your live blog too. No extra effort for editorial teams, and no risk of images or files “falling into the cracks”.
If you’ve built a really cool site with lots of unique elements to it, there should be nothing stopping you from using those elements in live blogs too.
With Glide, one of the major upsides to having a Live Reporting toolset within the main CMS is its ability to easily add unique or complex elements into reports in just the same way you would add them to any other type of content. Not an easy feat, if at all possible, when using disparate CMS and live blogging tools.
For example, to add a full Gallery into a live blog report, just add the Gallery widget as you would in a standard Article. No replicating needed.
Or let’s get more complex. Say you have built a data widget to include the details of a goal scorer and their history: just add it into your blog the same as you would a regular article.
Or let’s get seriously complex, and look at how iconic horse racing title Racing Post enhances their race day coverage using Glide CMS and its standard live reporting tools.
Racing Post editors wanted to enhance individual posts with imported Race Cards and commercial partner CTAs, all supplied by their proprietary in-house data system - just like they do on standard article pages. They did so by simply inserting the same widget into blog posts that they were used to inserting into articles, enabling readers to access key race information without having to leave the live blog page.
Widgets are one of the most helpful and powerful features of Glide, bundling together any variation of preset configurations, business rules and logic, and all types of content, in ways that can then be easily reused across sites and apps. Tasks that normally take days or weeks in a traditional CMS can be wrapped into a widget in just a few minutes and placed wherever needed - including individual blog posts!
Racing Post including a racecard link in their live reporting coverage of Day 3 of the Glorious Goodwood Races 1 August, 2024
Because of its unrivalled ability to deliver a dynamic experience with frequent updates, live blog reporting can multiply site visits and audience engagement.
Make the most of this increased traffic by interjecting your live updates with posts that direct readers to related content housed elsewhere on your site. Think in-depth articles, podcasts, individual profiles, and more.
Crosslinking not only enriches your live feed by providing readers with additional context, but facilitates movement across your site thereby increasing pageviews (great for sites with ad revenue streams) and increases time onsite (another positive SEO ranking factor).
Once again, there is a benefit to having your Live Reporting tools within the same CMS you use every day: Glide lets you fast-link to your other content instantly from within the post so you don’t need to go searching for front-end URLs in the middle of a busy event or worry about things like URLs changing. Connecting content is easy when it’s all in a single CMS.
Racing Post promoting related content in their race day live reporting race day coverage
Don’t think of posts as fragments of a single live blog but as fragments of your whole website experience. By categorising each post, you can do immeasurably more with them.
Let’s take for example the Olympics where you have fans across sports and likely countries. The inclination is to think of each post purely as a flow of snippets dropping into place as they are published under a single umbrella topic i.e. Olympic Games, limiting your ability to (easily and effectively) do more with these posts.
By taking a moment to categorise each post with some information or metadata, you open the possibilities of what you can do with them. For example, if you add front-end filtering to your live blog page, your fans are now able to curate your live reporting to show only the entries for the sport or country they’re interested in.
Another opportunity with categorised posts is to create mini live reports that can become their own landing pages or be added to other relevant landing pages on your site.
Glide’s Live Reporting tool allows whole teams of people to contribute posts, while making it easy for each of them to add categories to any of their posts, giving the editor and audiences a vast range of new possibilities.
In Glide CMS said categorisations are applied by using taxonomies, for two reasons. First - it’s super simple, and second - taxonomies come prepopulated with tons of vital metadata and drive some of the most powerful aspects of the whole system, so the full power of the CMS can be leveraged by even a single post deep within a live report.
A live blog without some sort of vivid indicator to audiences that it is up and running is missing a trick.
Improve the visibility of your live reporting to site visitors by including a “Live” designator they can see, highlighted text or graphic elements adjacent to where your live blog is listed on the homepage or category pages. You could go bigger and have a specific live blog panel on the site that lists all live events underway.
Also, in the report itself add a visual indicator that the report has received an update: a reader deep into the report gets a subtle nudge that there’s new information dropping in and can tap to spring to the latest update.
The same principle applies to a ‘return to latest post’ button: even if there is no new post to prompt an update alert, a button next to a post that whizzes the reader back to the beginning can save a lot of scrolling.
And when it’s all over - don’t scrap it! Lots of live reports get consigned to history shortly after the event is done just because they can be a hassle to manage and make readable or it’s pricey to retain them in a separate system. There’s a reason organisations typically try to reduce the number of CMS at play.
To solve readability, reverse the order of posts to display oldest to newest to provide contextual reading for those readers who want to come back and see how an event unfolded linearly. Re-experiencing a live report in reverse order is not fun!
And one last tip: if you feel comfortable adding the info, nothing says ‘This event is live!” than adding a current viewers-on-page count to your site or app.
In Glide’s Live Reporting tool, we’ve made it simple to turn report statuses ‘on’ and ‘off’ with the flick of a switch by editors, or able to be scheduled or after a fixed time. No need to make website front-end changes manually.
This scheduling also extends to entire reports and even individual posts, particularly useful if you want to prep a report for launching early in the day when your reporters might still be on the road and schedule in some early posts to get the tension building!
Additionally, Glide’s Live Reporting also delivers chronological ordering as an automatic setting, meaning you easily set the report to automatically end, mark itself as concluded and change its front-end signposting, and then flip the post chronology for linear re-reading, without needing to speak to anyone else or make any manual site changes.
Live reporting designation as shown on Racing Post, 22, August 2024
This is a small one, but important for SEO and user experience. In general, headlines are a good thing - but when it comes to live blogs a post might not have much to say beyond a single line of text, making the headline redundant to the body copy.
Look for a tool that gives you the flexibility to turn headlines on and off for each post (as Glide CMS’s Live Reporting tool does).
The use of live blog reporting to draw new audiences and build recurring engagement continues to grow, especially as technologies like Glide make it easier for journalists and editors to integrate into their website and app experiences. At Glide, we are working with media and sports organisations to both improve the effectiveness for those currently engaging in live blog reporting and build a live blog reporting strategy for those just getting off the ground.
To learn more about Glide CMS and our Live Reporting tools, or to request a demo, contact us today.
No matter where you are on your CMS journey, we're here to help. Want more info or to see Glide Publishing Platform in action? We got you.
Book a demo
