When done well, live blogs are easily the highest-trafficked parts of a news site. But not all live blogs are the same. Aside from having the right tools, there is an art to capturing the moment — key editorial practices and front-end elements which add to the audience experience and increase the impact of your live blogging efforts.
Here are six elements that should be standard in your live blog efforts, with just a little bit of how Glide Live Reporting makes it easy to incorporate them.
Did you know that summary panels are not yet a universal feature of live blogging?
Having a bulleted summary of highlights and major moments adjacent to the top of your live blog page provides readers an easy-to-consume outline.
For an optimal user experience, link summary points directly to the relevant post, or even a standalone article if a separate story is warranted. This gives readers a direct line to the moment without scrolling through pages in the timeline.
Update the summary as frequently as needed to add key events as they happen. Think about including handy notes to remind readers when to check back, such as game start times or vote deadlines.
How Glide makes it easy to add a summary to live blogs:
One of the reasons summaries are not as common as they should be is the background technology. Secondary live blog systems that drop an iframe embed on a page won’t control content outside the embed. This means, for teams using a separate live blogging CMS, editors might have to excessively navigate around both systems to create the summary content.
A CMS within a CMS, Glide Live Reporting is natively built into the Glide CMS. Amongst its features is a summary component that sits alongside the post creation text editor. Simply add your summary points, link to the desired post and save.
We all know that using action images and videos makes live blogs more dynamic and visually appealing, breaking up walls of text and adding context and clarity. But more than just improving the aesthetic of your blog, visual elements can have a strong positive impact on SEO metrics.
To make your live blog a real audience experience, look to include multimedia elements such as:
How Glide makes it easy to include multimedia elements in live blogs:
Beyond the technical constraints found in secondary live blog systems to embed interactive elements, 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 Live Reporting is part of the main CMS, any media assets or files you would normally have access to and the business logic attached to them is automatically carried over and enforced in your live blog as well. No extra effort to embed and no risk of assets “falling into the cracks.”
If your site has unique elements to it, there should be nothing stopping you from using them in your live blogs.
With Glide, one of the major upsides to having a Live Reporting CMS within the main CMS is the ability to easily add unique or complex elements into live blogs the same way you would add them to any other content type.
For example, to add a full Gallery to a live blog, just add the Gallery widget as you would in a standard article. No replicating, plug-ins or iframes needed.
Or, say you built a data widget to populate individual profiles. Just add that widget into your blog the same as you would a regular article. Iconic horse racing title Racing Post uses this functionality to enhance its race day coverage.
To increase the functionality of individual posts, Racing Post imports race cards and commercial partner CTAs, all supplied by its proprietary in-house data system, into the posts just like it does on standard article pages. They do so by simply inserting the same widget into the desired live blog posts the same way they do for an article, enabling readers to access key race information without having to leave the live blog page.
How Glide makes it easy to add unique and complex elements to live blogs:
Widgets are one of the most helpful and powerful features of the Glide CMS, bundling together any variation of preset configurations, business rules, 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 live blog posts.
Make the most of live blog traffic by interjecting live updates with posts that direct readers to related content already published elsewhere on your site. Think in-depth articles, podcasts, individual profiles, etc.
Crosslinking not only enriches your live blog by providing readers with additional context, but facilitates movement across your site thereby increasing pageviews (great for sites with ad revenue streams) and time onsite (another positive SEO ranking factor).
How Glide makes it easy to integrate cross-site content into live blogs:
With Glide, instantly fast-link to published content from within the text editor, eliminating the need to search for front-end URLs or worry about things like URLs changing. Connecting content is easy when it’s all in a single CMS.
Don’t think of posts as fragments of a single live blog but as components of your whole website experience. By categorizing each post, you can do immeasurably more with them.
Take for example the Olympics, where you have fans across both sports and countries. The inclination is to think of a live blog solely as a flow of snippets dropping into place as they are published under a single umbrella topic, i.e. Olympic Games.
Categorize each post with relevant information or metadata to open the possibilities of what else they can be used for. By adding front-end filtering to your live blog page, audiences can curate the categorized posts to show only the entries for the sport or country they’re interested in. Another opportunity with categorized posts is to create mini live blogs that become their own landing pages or sections added to other relevant landing pages on your site.
How Glide makes it easy to categorize live blog posts:
In the Glide CMS we make it easy to pre-configure categories and apply them to posts. This is done through taxonomies. We take this approach for two reasons. First — it’s super simple, and second — taxonomies come prepopulated with 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 blog.
Improve the visibility of your live blog to site visitors by including a “Live” designator they can see, such as highlighted text or graphic elements adjacent to where your live blog lives on the homepage or category pages. If you run multiple live blogs, include a specific live blog panel on the site that lists all live events underway.
In the blog itself, add a visual indicator that the blog has received an update: a reader deep in the blog gets a subtle nudge that there’s new information 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 where they are located that whizzes the reader back to the beginning can save a lot of scrolling.
And when it’s all over — don’t scrap the blog! Lots of live blogs get consigned to history shortly after the event is done because they can be a hassle to manage and make readable or it’s pricey to retain them in a separate system.
To solve readability, reverse the order of posts to display oldest to newest for a linear reading of how an event unfolded.
How Glide makes it easy to signpost live blogs:
We’ve made it simple for editors to turn blog statuses “on” and “off” with the flick of a switch or to end at a pre-scheduled fixed time or duration. There's no need for manual website front-end changes.
This scheduling extends to individual posts as well, which is particularly useful for prepping a live blog launch early in the day when your reporters might still be on the road.
Also worth noting is Glide Live Reporting's chronological ordering as an automatic setting. Use this to set the blog to automatically end, mark itself as concluded and change its front-end signposting, and then flip the post chronology for linear re-reading — all without needing to speak to anyone else or make any manual site changes.
The use of live blogs 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 live blogs into their website and app experiences. At Glide, we work with media organizations and news organizations to both improve the effectiveness for those currently engaging in live blogs and build a strategy for those just getting off the ground
To learn more about Glide CMS and Glide Live Reporting, or to request a demo, contact us today.
