The use of rolling news blogs to cover breaking stories is “the way to go” for regional newspaper websites, according to a leading editorial trainer.
Local World’s Paul Wiltshire, pictured left, made the assertion in a post on his own blog, in which he extolled the virtues of such features being used by newspapers’ websites.
Paul offered particular praise for the Newsquest-owned Oxford Mail’s coverage of a hotel fire on Friday as an example of a “sharp, human, attractive, up to date and useful” use of the web as a platform for rolling coverage of breaking news.
Mail staff used their content management system to run a continuous blog summarising the key developments, linking out to galleries and individual stories relating to the ongoing situation.
Recent improvements to Local World’s own sites feature the ability to include better picture embeds, use of subheads, coloured fonts and PDF embeds on web stories.
Paul added more improvements to the company’s websites would be forthcoming, although he did not provide further details on what this would involve.
He wrote: “With our own Local World system, a recent upgrade means we can now do this sort of thing better than ever, with further improvements due later in the year.
“When there’s only one story in town, this is the way to go, answering the huge demand for information in bite-size chunks.
“When I see smart coverage of big news stories, it makes me proud to be part of this profession.”
Paul took up his current role last year, having previously been deputy editor of the Bath Chronicle.
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Be good if I could actually log on easily in the morning first as stage one of this Brave New World….
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Nice idea in theory. You see the OM has by today’s standard got a generous staffing count. We are talking about a paper which has two picture editors. Compare that to say Trinity Mirror titles who would be lucky to have a staff photographer. If you have a few general purpose reporters knocking around, great, get them to update it. But generally everyone is too busy in regional offices to dedicate time to one story, or their role doesn’t cover such activity.
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There is no doubt staff head count is bearing the brunt of industry re-organisation but used properly some of the new digital tools are ‘force multipliers’ and can really add to coverage of big breaking events and in real time.
However it is the day-to-day bread and butter stuff that is suffering on most local news websites. It is woeful that the top ‘news’ item on many sites is often congestion on a motorway system miles from the patch, or something that is happening to a national retailer and ergo it sort of affects the patch, a national survey into something that might interest someone on the patch, a deal from a restaurant chain with outlets in the patch and train times, with a sprinkling of what would have once been late page filler nibs – ‘Police appeal after attempted break-in’ with obligatory blue Do Not Cross tape image!
And you can read all this while battling the dreaded pop-ups, mouse hover activated ads, background audio ads.
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Perhaps those stories are most interesting to the reader who, after all, is the most important person to any news group, surely?
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Totally disagree. The BBC, Guardian and Telegraph, among others, all use rolling blogs for live news, and as soon as I see them, I switch off. They don’t tell a story in anything like a correct or chronological order; trying to work out what’s going on is like an impossible jigsaw.
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@jim Agreed. Some paper websites use the rolling blog exclusively, so there is, in fact, no story anywhere on the site telling you what’s actually going on. Just mad.
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Ex-Buryite – point taken but, to quote that well known philosopher and social commentator Paul Weller, in this case I fear ‘the public wants what the public gets’!
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Jim, you are 100 per cent correct. Local World has been focusing on page views from every man and his dog over the last year and they’ve finally realised it’s pointless for driving revenue.
The effort has now turned to time spent on site which, I have to say, is a much better focus considering how little time the average user spends on a typical local news website in a month. However, rolling blogs are not the answer. When your loyal digital readers only drop in once or twice a day, the last thing that’s going to keep them on the site for an extra 30 seconds is a few poorly written updates in a rolling blog where you have to scroll back through other equally poor updates to get to the guts of the story.
It’s bad enough when something big happens nationally and Sky News flogs it to death the at the expense of everything else, so can you imagine this at a local level?
Stop trying to compete with local TV and start doing things which engage and connect with specific communities.
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