Lecture 8 in the course From Gatekeeping to Gatewatching: News and Journalism in the Digital Age. This lecture series addresses the continuing transformation of the production and consumption of journalism in the contemporary media environment. It provides a brief history of the impact of participatory online news production and engagement practices – from the first wave of citizen journalism to the social media platforms of today – on how news content is disseminated and experienced; examines reactive and proactive responses to these changes by news organisations and journalists; and explores the longer-term impact of these developments on the public sphere, touching on the power of social media platforms and their role in shaping their users’ information diets. Readings are largely drawn from Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere (Bruns, 2018), with additional readings recommended for selected lectures. Reading for this lecture: Bruns, A. (2018). Hybrid News Coverage: Liveblogs. Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere. Ch. 7. Peter Lang.

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Hybrid News Coverage:
Liveblogs
Prof. Axel Bruns
Guest Professor, IKMZ, University of Zürich
a.bruns@qut.edu.au — a.bruns@ikmz.uzh.ch

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Journalism and Social Media
• Last week:
• The growing use of social media (and social media metrics) by news organisations
• This week:
• Liveblogging as an attempt to blend journalistic and social media practices
• Next week:
• Responding to the challenge of ‘fake news’ and other mis- and disinformation

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Liveblogs?

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A New Format

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Why Liveblogs?
• Journalism and the challenge of social media:
• Individual journalists creating social media presences and becoming personal brands, …
• … but thereby also meeting their audiences on uncommon, neutral ground
• News organisations setting up their online spaces and social media accounts, …
• … but struggling to attract readers to their Websites (and generate advertising income)
• New operators (BuzzFeed News, Huffington Post, …) inventing sticky, clickbait formats, …
• … drawing audiences away from conventional news media
 Need for a sticky format that brings audiences back to mainstream news media
 Liveblogs: many of the features of social media without being social media

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‘the audience which publishers will need to find will not be super-
light users, the one-and-dones who spend a few seconds on
many different sites, but truly engaged readers and viewers who
are prepared to devote real time to content of real quality and
relevance’
— New York Times CEO Mark Thompson

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‘innovative forms of production … emerge in the initial stages of new communication technologies’ —
Hermida et al.
‘social media enhance the opportunities to publish evolving news on a rolling basis instead of
presenting complete stories’ — Broersma and Graham
‘[liveblogs are] a crucible for many of the contemporary developments in digital journalism
practice’ — Thurman and Schapals
‘live blogging and realtime curation allow newspapers … to compete against
broadcasters in rolling news’ — Charman-Anderson
‘characterised by a loose frame and lack of fixed script’ —
Tereszkiewicz
‘set up to run the news continuously until the event in question terminates or its newsworthiness
decreases’ — Tereszkiewicz
‘abandoning vetting before dissemination and moving towards the bloggers’ transparent
method of creating truth’ (?) — Karlsson

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• Borrowing from social media:
• (Usually) single topic or event
• Reverse chronological order
• Frequently updated
• Fact(oid)s + quick-take interpretation
• Conversational tone
• Journalistic storytelling as it happens
• Journalists reinstated as sense-makers
• Embedding tweets, images, videos, …
• (Sometimes) including user comments
and questions
• Improving on social media:
• Story summaries and new update alerts
at the top
• Less ‘noisy’ than social media
themselves
• Carefully curated by one or more
journalists through the day
• Journalists as gatewatchers, news
curators, and newssharers, but on their
own terms and in their own space
• Unusual for journalism: frequent outlinks
to other sources
Features of Liveblogs

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Origins

15. Born from Tragedy: London, 7 July 2005

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‘the journalist moves from a linear, one-off story to a stream of instant
witnessing, often combined with background context and analysis as
well as public interactivity through comments or email’ — Beckett
‘it may not be the events that are of primary importance in live blogs,
but it is reactions and interpretations of the news that are ascribed
more value and meaningfulness’ — Tereszkiewicz

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‘Live Blogging is predominantly conducted from the office.
Although reporting from journalists in the field is often
included, the author of the Live Blog, whose responsibility it
is to pull everything together into a narrative, tends to be
office-bound’
— Thurman and Walters
‘with Live Blogging … you have this view that there are lots
of other people out there who are your eyes and ears’
— Paul Lewis (The Guardian) qtd. in Thurman and Walters

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Liveblogging before Liveblogs?
(https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/23/3890674/tweeting-the-news-andy-carvin-test-pilots-twitter-journalism)

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‘you can say “Look, this is out there, we can’t verify it, but
this is being talked about, this is part of the story”. We’re
letting you in on the workflow of the journalist in a way …
saying “Look this is out there, help us verify it”. And
readers do jump in and say “That’s rubbish”, “That’s not
true”’
— Matthew Weaver qtd. in Thurman and Walters

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And Audiences?

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‘news items are basically published before they have been completed’ — Karlsson
‘the emphasis is on the direct relaying of commentary and analysis as events are
unfolding, rather than a written-through narrative constructed after the event’ — Thurman
and Walters
‘readers following the event over the day will have seen drafts dismissed and the story
changed, thus being exposed to the gathering and processing phases of journalism’ —
Karlsson
‘a somewhat fragmented picture of events, composed of reports, comments and witnesses’ accounts, with the
reporter acting as a moderator and intermediary who brings different voices and accounts into a whole’ —
Tereszkiewicz
‘genre hybridisation’: ‘the quoted texts introduce … such genres as an interview, debate,
report, news story, a feature article, or a comment’ — Tereszkiewicz
‘live blogs … contain about 15 times more multimedia elements than print articles and nearly
five and a half times more than traditional online articles’ — Thurman and Schapals
‘[outlinks as] a strategy aiming at providing readers with as complete a picture of an
event as possible, together with various interpretations’ — Tereszkiewicz

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‘you can’t fill this hole on [live] news pages just through official sources, just through the old media – you
have to look at social media’ — Thurman and Schapals
‘Live Blogs offer a new context for participation’ — Thurman and Walters
‘social newsgathering encompasses not just trying to get our own audience to share their material with
us, but searching social media and the rest of the web whenever a story breaks’ — Matthew Eltringham
(BBC News)
‘curation and curated social media content can be the means by which media outlets and
journalists can establish a new important role in the future media ecosystem’ — Stanoevska-
Slabeva et al.
‘a publishing model that choses the best content from bottom-up consumer
media and provides it to top-down enterprise sites’ — Liu
‘Live Blogging, with its emphasis on relaying information as events are unfolding, may
make … [fact-checking] harder to develop and maintain’ — Thurman and Walters

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‘Publish, Then Verify’
‘if I’ve got something substantially wrong I will acknowledge that—within the [Live]
Blog—as quickly as possible in the most recent post. What I will also do is go
back to the original post. I won’t do an invisible mend [but rather] I will insert a
correction within the original post. If you just correct it in the most recent post …
it’s quite possible someone will see the original erroneous post but not pick up the
subsequent correction’
— Andrew Sparrow qtd. in Thurman and Walters
‘publish, then filter’ — Clay Shirky (2002)

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Confusing?
‘there is no structure and therefore no sense, and the effect is of being in the middle of a room full
of loud, shouty and excitable people all yelling at once with all the phones ringing, the fire alarm
going off and a drunken old boy slurring in your ear about “what it all means”’ — Symes
‘some of the aggregation that we’re doing is really difficult to navigate unless you’re a news
junkie. We have to make sure that a stream of news aggregation doesn’t feel like a
maddening stream of consciousness’ — Charman-Anderson
‘how does the average reader easily navigate this’ — Andrew Sparrow (The
Guardian)
‘[news users are] more than twice as likely to participate in Live Blogs compared with other article
types’ — Thurman and Walters
‘uniquely suited to readers’ at-work news consumption patterns’ — Thurman and Walters

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The Daily Newsbeat
Liveblog

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‘if you can open your site up and allow other voices in, you
get something that’s more engaged, more involved, and
actually … journalistically better’ — Alan Rusbridger (former
Guardian editor)
‘the way it changes reporting is typical of networked
journalism. It is a concentrated dose of participatory,
interactive and connected news media, facilitated by a
professional, mainstream media journalist or team. It could
become the new online “front page”’
— Charlie Beckett

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Next Time

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Readings
8. 11.11.: Hybrid News Coverage: Liveblogs
Bruns, A. (2018). Hybrid News Coverage: Liveblogs. Gatewatching and News Curation:
Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere. Ch. 7. Peter Lang.
9. 18.11.: ‘Real’ News and ‘Fake’ News: Fact-Checking and Media Literacy
Graves, L., & Cherubini, F. (2016). The Rise of Fact-Checking Sites in Europe. Reuters Institute for
the Study of Journalism. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:d55ef650-e351-4526-b942-
6c9e00129ad7

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Lecture
• NOTE:
• All lectures from here on will be in person in BIN-0-K.02!