Abstract
This article investigates how competition among news outlets and editorial strategies of news outlets affect both their decisions to publish a live blog in the event of a terrorist attack and whether to implement 10 quality dimensions in the live blogs. We draw on theories related to herd behavior and strategy formation. We use quantitative content analysis data covering 22 terrorist attacks in Western Europe and 29 corresponding live blogs during a time period of 14 years. We investigate live blogs of three major Swiss news websites: nzz.ch, tagesanzeiger.ch and blick.ch. We control for professionalization, a key event and newsroom convergence, as well as the news factors damage, impact and centrality. Linear and logistic regressions are applied. The results show that competition plays a significant role in decisions regarding whether or not to publish a live blog. Moreover, competition speeds up the provision of information and expands its scope. The editorial strategies, in turn, generate different approaches as to how this information is conveyed to news consumers.
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