Live Blog Research Articles

Performing Discourse in Pursuit of Credibility: A Quantitative Content Analysis of Dutch Live Blogs

ABSTRACT Live blogs are a popular format for covering crises, breaking news, politics, or sports events. Despite their popularity among journalists and the public, the format has also been subject to scholarly debate regarding the conflict between immediacy versus credibility, resulting in a high degree of uncertainty for producers and consumers. Journalists cope with this paradox by performing discourse: imposing valid and persuasive representations of the social world. One way to do so is by the use and representation of sources. In this paper, we uncover the performative discourse of live blogs through possible patterns of sourcing and discursive strategies among a range of live blogs and the way journalists cope with the mix of speed and uncertainty. Based on a quantitative content analysis of nine Dutch live blogs, we conclude that journalists follow the same conventions and routines as regular (online) articles. Despite the possibilities for polyvocality (more and different voices in live blogs) due to the accessibility by social media, journalists choose predominantly formal sources and report their speech predominantly in a direct way.

Hybrid News (in the) Making: A Content and Corpus-Based Discourse Analysis of Political Live Blogs on the 2020 US Presidential Debates

ABSTRACT Political journalism continues to be the main source of political information in deliberative democracies. However, the advent of hybrid media systems during the last decade(s) has altered how journalists cover politics and how audiences consume relevant content. In this context, live blogging has emerged as a web-based alternative to traditional TV broadcasting. To explore whether and in which forms the trend toward hybrid media systems is empirically traceable in current journalism practice, the present study focuses on political live blogging from four popular media outlets covering the two 2020 US presidential TV debates. It applies a discourse-oriented, mixed-methods, corpus-based approach and specifically considers sourcing practices as well as the normalization of professional role conceptions and practices of objectivity. Results suggest that political live blogging establishes multi-layered and multi-authored discourse that places strong emphasis on accountability and disclosure transparency by updating and linking information, while maintaining the journalistic gatekeeping/gatewatching function. It further emerges that political live blogs are characterized by an informal tone but also by a continuation of traditional news media practices as regards objectivity, as instantiated by the salience of debate topics and political terms and by a clear delineation of information from opinion and contextualization.

Live blogs can’t handle the truth? A contemporary cross-cultural consideration of transparency and procedural justice

Reporting from trials using live blogs to continuously inform readers about courtroom events have rapidly become an established part of legal life and are often assumed to fulfill demands of open justice. However, a deep sociolegal understanding of how legal professionals perceive live blogs as affecting procedural justice is currently missing, as is a thick understanding of what transparency means to legal professionals. As more detailed knowledge on contemporary transparency will contribute to understanding the acceptance and resistance to open justice and specific reporting formats, this study focuses on the interlinking of legal professionals, transparency and live blogs. A qualitative cross-cultural approach finds that legal professionals consider Bentham’s tenets to be partially transformed, in particular regarding the original truth function. Rather than enabling truths, legal professionals perceive live blogs as a threat to truths. Nevertheless, live blogs are considered to provide good enough transparency in relation to specific jurisdictional contexts.

Constructing clickable criminal trials: framing trials and legal professionals in digital news reports

Journalistic live blogging entails the conundrum of capturing emotions in a context where they should be absent, snapping up the sensational in the subtle drama of the courtroom and presenting it in a way that attracts readers, thus making it clickable. Applying an inductive frame analysis of live blogs and drawing on criteria of newsworthiness and an emotion sociological framework, this article shows two frames of understanding criminal trials are constructed in live blogs: prosecutorial power and teamwork. These frames serve to construct and reconstruct understandings of criminal trials in Sweden. The frames are partially embedded in the legal sphere thereby reproducing the ideological underpinnings of unemotional rationality while concomitantly conveying a more contemporary understanding wherein reason and emotion are conflated. The study shows further that the media frame shapes how criminal trials are reported in live blogs leading to a somewhat distorted understanding of trials being conveyed. Legal professionals are made newsworthy by drawing on news values, particularly emotionalisation, which constitutes a crucial tool for the live blogging journalist.

Sports live text commentary as a hybrid register

Aim: To present and analyze features of live text commen-tary (LTC) as a recent register of the English language using examples from the coverage of UEFA Euro 2020. The paper explores the influence of spoken language and sports an-nouncer talk (SAT) on the register. It focuses on the differ-ences and similarities between LTC and SAT and presents an overview of features unique to LTC.Methods: LTC was examined as a text variety following Chovanec’s (2018) analysis and using the register perspec-tive proposed by Biber and Conrad (2009). Examples from fourteen LTCs reporting on the UEFA Euro 2020 competition held in June/July 2021 were analyzed, including their typ-ical situational and linguistic characteristics and some of their functions.Results: LTC is a hybrid register that exemplifies today’s convergence of different media. LTCs take the context of production from live blogs, while their language is main-ly reminiscent of SAT, including tense usage and adoption of certain forms. Spoken language, in general, is also an in-fluence, especially on the syntactic and grammatical levels. Distinct LTC features include the internal structure, icons, and interactiveness of the text. The analyzed commentaries feature clearly outlined sections (e.g., opening and closing posts) that serve specific discursive purposes. Icons have a particular function in LTC; their meaning is well-estab-lished, and they sometimes function as utterances. Another remarkable characteristic is the intertextuality derived from text contributions provided by various spectators of the sports event, including fans. This interaction is, at times, simulated. Conclusion: The paper confirmed LTC as a hybrid format with avenues for further hybridization. In LTC, we see an intertwining of different elements, which, taken together, produce a new whole in a process typical of the conver-gence seen in the media today. The most innovative aspects of LTC, the intertextuality, interactiveness, and co-produc-tion of a text, are limited.

CORRIGENDUM to “The criminal trial as a live event: Exploring how and why live blogs change the professional practices of judges, defence lawyers and prosecutors”

CORRIGENDUM to “The criminal trial as a live event: Exploring how and why live blogs change the professional practices of judges, defence lawyers and prosecutors”

The dynamic configuration of non-linear texts in live blogs: a discursive approach

Abstract News platforms increasingly cover ongoing events through live blogs. In these texts, individual updates with the latest developments are issued every few minutes and added into a reverse chronology list containing everything published up to that point. Even though the fragments work as a whole – as they make up a single account of a specific event – they must, at the same time, let online users opt in and out at different points of the coverage, while providing the necessary elements for a felicitous interpretation. This article examines the discursive mechanisms that allow live blogs to do this. The discursive analysis of six reports by The Guardian and BBC News shows that cohesive links that make interpretation dependent on items that have already been mentioned, such as pronouns and conjunctions, while common within single posts, rarely ever create ties across them. The study identifies the most frequent types of cohesive devices between posts and explains how they also interact with other elements that provide them with context. Finally, I conclude that the relative autonomy the posts enjoy enable users to navigate the text in non-sequential ways, which reduces the media’s control over the discursive interaction as the final product is assembled by the reader.

The criminal trial as a live event: Exploring how and why live blogs change the professional practices of judges, defence lawyers and prosecutors

Live blogging from legal trials has become one of the most accessible ways in which the public can gain direct insight into legal proceedings, particularly in countries where television cameras are denied entry into the courtroom. Whilst live blogging constitutes an important way of ensuring the transparency and openness of legal processes and documents – a principle known as open justice and a key component of many democratic societies – the risks stemming from opening up the courts not only to more immediate and detailed scrutiny, but also to a larger, virtual audience are lesser known. A deeper understanding of how a legal trial’s transformation into a live event due to live blogs has impacted on the legal sphere is therefore needed. The aims of this article are thus twofold: to show how live blogs are changing legal professionals’ work practices and to discuss what it is about live blogs that leads to these changes in professional practices. The analysis draws on qualitative interviews with legal professionals in Sweden and Denmark and finds that live blogs increase reflection in professional performances stemming from an awareness of performing to a virtual audience. Surveillance thus leads to performance adjustment. Live blogs also lead to changes in professionals practices and transform the audience/participant boundary into a fluid one most notably regarding the Danish respondents in comparison to those in Sweden. The article also suggests a hierarchy of liveness with live blogs considered to be less intrusive than televised trials.

Live blog summarization

Live blogs are an increasingly popular news format to cover breaking news and live events in online journalism. Online news websites around the world are using this medium to give their readers a minute by minute update on an event. Good summaries enhance the value of the live blogs for a reader, but are often not available. In this article, (a) we first define the task of summarizing a live blog, (b) study ways of automatically collecting corpora for live blog summarization, and (c) understand the complexity of the task by empirically evaluating well-known state-of-the-art unsupervised and supervised summarization systems on our new corpus. We show that live blog summarization poses new challenges in the field of news summarization, since frequency and positional signals cannot be used. We make our tools publicly available to reconstruct the corpus and to conduct our empirical experiments. This encourages the research community to build upon and replicate our results.

Engagement With Live Blogs: When Passive Consumption Overpowers Participation

This study investigated citizen participation in live blogs in the changing media ecosystem from the public sphere perspective. The live blog is a web-native, participatory-oriented journalistic genre comprised of brief updates of an event in motion and designed to deliver real-time information from multiple sources about breaking news and scheduled events. To examine participation in this contemporary news format, the current, exploratory study, collected survey responses from 339 volunteers and found that participation was not a motivating factor for readers to engage in live blogging on a deeper level. Other study findings pertaining to participation were also pessimistic, showing that the majority of participants were not personally interested in participating in live blogging. This is an important finding for digital journalism as it implies that the capacity of online platforms to accommodate participation does not necessarily translate into citizens’ willingness to participate.

The epistemology of live blogging

This article proposes a typology of the epistemology of live blogging through an analysis of two live news blogs: Radio New Zealand (RNZ) News’ live blog of a significant earthquake in Aotearoa New Zealand in November 2016 and BBC News’ live blog of the Brexit referendum result in June 2016. We use these cases to draw out five features of the genre that we suggest may characterise other live news blogs. We demonstrate that these blogs tend to (1) produce a fragmentary narrative that (2) reflects particular moments in time, (3) curate an array of textual objects from a range of information sources to produce ‘networked balance’, (4) gain coherence from an often informal authorial voice or voices and (5) generate claims to knowledge of events which are simultaneously dynamic and fragile. This typology contributes to understanding journalism’s position within networked information spaces.

Gratifications of digital media: what motivates users to consume live blogs

ABSTRACT A live blog has become an increasingly popular journalistic genre for covering events in motion. Even though it has been embraced by digital media users, little is known about motivating factors that drive readers to consume this format for delivering news. Hence, this study makes a valuable contribution to the still developing research about the live blog by employing uses and gratifications approach and surveying 339 Internet users, the majority of whom were undergraduate students, to understand what motivates them to read live blogs. The study results suggest that contemporary gratifications – immediacy and convenience – along with information seeking, were the main motivating factors of live-blog consumption. Furthermore, frequency of reading online news and immediacy were identified as the key predictors of the live-blog use, signaling that digital media consumers have an increasing need to acquire live reports about major events.

ДРУШТВЕНЕ ИНТЕРНЕТСКЕ МРЕЖЕ И ТРАДИЦИОНАЛНИ МЕДИЈИ

The aim of this paper is to present the ways and forms in which traditional media have adapted to the digital world, primarily to the Internet social networks and the interactive possibilities provided by them. The research question is: do and to what extent the traditional media use the opportunities offered by social media. During the search for the answer to this question, the results of this academic research and the results obtained from the in-depth interviews with the editors of the web sites of the six leading traditional media in Serbia carried out by the author of this paper were analyzed. The conclusion is that traditional media use social networks predominantly to promote their online editions, and that those media which want to be influential in this filed use social network sites as a source of information and generate a new genre - a live blog.

Utilization and perception of live-blogging coverage of an international manual physical therapy conference

ABSTRACTObjective: The purpose of this study was to investigate the utilization and perception of live blogged sessions of a physical therapy (PT) conference.Methods: Sessions at an international PT conference were covered in real time using a live-blogging platform. Session coverage could be viewed remotely using computers and mobile devices. Viewers could interact with the content by clicking on links and using the comment feature. Sessions could also be replayed following their conclusion. An online survey of user perceptions was made available the week following the conference.Results: Twenty-four sessions were live blogged with an average session length of 67 min (range: 27–120). On average, live sessions received 27 views (range: 2–65), 18 clicks (range: 2–36), and 2 comments (range: 0–10). The average time spent viewing a live session was 28 min (32% of viewers <1 min; 68% >1 min). Following the conference, session replays totaled 7206 views and 2910 clicks. The average survey respondent (n = 17) watched five live sessions (range: 1–17) and found the updates easy to read (4.5 on a scale of 5.0). When asked if they learned something from the coverage, 94% of respondents said yes and 94% said they would view if available for an upcoming conference.Discussion: Live blogging extended the viewing audience and facilitated viewer engagement. Survey respondents found the coverage educational, of high quality, and would participate again in the future.

Seven Characteristics Defining Online News Formats

Whilst live blogs have become an established part of the news media ecology, corresponding research is still in its infancy, especially that which examines the crucial question of sourcing practices. Focussing on three UK news organisations – BBC News, the Guardian and the Telegraph – in this article we provide the largest and most comprehensive empirical study to date comparing sourcing practices in online news and live blogs. We analyse sourcing practices across three different genres of live blogging and corresponding online news articles, through a comparative analysis of events broadly categorised as crisis, politics and sport. Our findings suggest that there are some aspects of sourcing practices that are distinct to live blogs, such as directly embedding social media. However, when it comes to polyvocality (the diversity of who gets to speak), genre-specific journalism norms seem to account for more than the affordances of the platform itself and only in sport live blogs are demotic voices habitually included. Based on these findings, we develop a typology of live blogging and online news articles that documents the nuances in sourcing patterns across different news formats and genres, and provide a theoretical basis for future research in this field.

&lt;em&gt;Chasing Shadows: Visions of Our Coming Transparent World&lt;/em&gt;, edited by David Brin and Stephen W. Potts

Chasing Shadows is a collection of short stories by various authors. The stories illustrate how transparent we've become in terms of privacy now that we're constantly connected to social media. They target such topics as government surveillance, live blogging, politics, and parenting. The collection was edited by David Brin and Stephen W. Potts.

Between the technological hare and the journalistic tortoise: Minimization of knowledge claims in online news flashes

A growing series of news platforms such as live blogging, tweeting, and push notifications are struggling with the extreme pressure of immediate reporting. The current study explores which strategies of knowledge acquisition and knowledge presentation journalists who operate immediate channels are using to address the mounting pressures and enhanced risk of error. It focuses on online news flashes that at least in the Israeli case enable systematic comparison of four types of output: routine and crisis news flashes and routine and crisis final items that follow them. Findings show that news flash editors develop special practices to acquire and present knowledge – the most prominent being minimization of knowledge claims. However, significantly higher use of modality, evidentiality, and source responses (measures for minimizing journalists’ knowledge claims) was found only in crisis flashes. This may suggest that journalists find themselves outside their epistemic comfort zone only under the convergence of crisis and immediacy. According to ‘inductive error’ theory, the studied websites act as responsible epistemic actors, who are so concerned about ‘false-positive’ errors (untrue publications) that they do not hesitate to make ‘false-negative’ ones (delaying publication, minimizing knowledge claims, and sharing them with third parties).

Live blogging and national identity: Images of now and here

Live blogging and national identity: Images of now and here

Live Blogging about Terrorist Attacks

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.

Conversations in the margins: Fannish paratexts and their premodern roots

Abstract This article considers fanfictional paratexts – including peritexts such as author’s notes, warnings, epigraphs and tags, as well as the related epitexts of comments, memes, recs and live blogs – in the context not only of the fanfiction they accompany but also of the critical conversations they generate and perpetuate within themselves. The parallels between premodern literature’s expansive paratextual spaces and the equally expansive – if virtual – spaces that frame contemporary fanworks, specifically fanfiction, point to similarly transactional qualities at work in both, balancing authorial intent, production/archival specifications and reader response. By considering these seemingly disparate literary worlds in conversation with one another, we can not only illuminate an antecedent for fanworks and fan community interactions but also offer medieval and early modern studies a potentially useful language for talking about premodern literary culture.