Two regional dailies have launched live blogs on their websites to cover breaking news across their patches.
The Manchester Evening News and Daily Post in North Wales have both created homepage blogs which will be updated throughout each day with news, sport, traffic and weather information.
They were launched this month as part of an experiment in new ways of covering breaking news, with the two papers chosen for the trial because they cover very different geographical areas.
And the live blogs, which are powered by ScribbleLive in North Wales and CoverItLive at the MEN, could be rolled out to other titles across the Trinity Mirror group.
Digital publishing director David Higgerson said: “Our readers have an insatiable appetite for breaking news and it doesn’t need to be several hundred words long, just a small piece about it.
“The live blogs are a good way of getting that information to people quickly.
“It is helping people stay on the site longer and return more during the day. It helps us to differentiate between the printed product and the website.
“There has been a very positive response. People have been really good at saying they like this service and saying what new things they would like to see as well.”
David added he would like to roll it out to other titles and would discuss with editors about the best ways of running a live blog on their sites.
The creation of the live blogs has been led by editor Alison Gow at the Daily Post and Sarah Lester, executive editor for digital, at the MEN.
They are run from early in the morning until around 10pm at night and are run by one or two reporters each day, with the whole newsroom also being involved.
The blogs have also included lighter posts, such as quizzes and photos from the area.
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What contribution to the company’s revenues will these blogs make?
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I’m assuming that they want to attract significantly more hits to the sites so they can sell better figures to the advertisers, but again, it all boils down to the big question of the overall profitability of digital offerings.
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Poor old TM staffers. Their newsrooms have been decimated in recent years and now they’ve got to find time and effort for all this nonsense too.
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nonsense ? so the function is not to break news any more?
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Cherrywonder…why is a service that breaks news a “nonsense”? You are clearly not a journalist or if you are then you have forgotten why you became one.
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Yeah, funny thing is I thought that was what newspaper websites were for.
You know, for journalists to break news on, not to have them faffing about writing blogs, putting up pointless quizzes and ‘photographs of the area’ etc.
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“People have been really good at saying they like this service and saying what new things they would like to see as well.”
How can someone be good at saying they like something? Can they bad at saying they like something as well?
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Cherrywonder – you spend an awful lot of time on here criticising others. Newspaper websites have to work hard to keep readers on there, that’s how the advertising model stacks up. Anyone who has spent any time working on websites knows that news alone doesn’t do that – people want other types of content to keep them coming back, so quizzes and pictures and fun stuff help to do that. Easier to snark, though, I know.