These pages and content formats, which include live blogs, live update or briefing pages, and live chats, drive more content consumption, deliver stronger subscriber conversion, and tend to play an important role in subscriber retention. So even after the coronavirus receded slightly from news publishers’ front pages, publishers used the tools during last year’s protests, presidential elections, and even the unrest that led to the Jan. 6 invasion of the U.S. Capitol.

“The performance of the live blog has been extraordinary,” said Patrick Kerkstra, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s managing editor, who noted the Inquirer’s live update format has a subscriber conversion rate that’s twice as high as the publisher’s standard articles. “It’s been a conversion monster.” Exact conversion rates were not provided.

The live format and idea is far from new — publishers have been hosting live blogs and similar formats on their sites for more than a decade. But interest in them had also begun to revive before last year’s pandemic. The New York Times, for example, used its live briefing format 200 times in 2018, and more than 400 times in 2019, said Marc Lacey, the Times’s first-ever assistant managing editor of live, a new division charged with driving adoption of the Times’s live briefings, live blog and live chat formats across the newsroom.

But last year reminded publishers how valuable live news, updates and analysis can be to readers. The relentless bombardment of big stories gave publishers a fresh chance every month to break down what was going on for readers in areas ranging from public health to politics to sports to business.

“It showed [the format’s] possibilities in really dramatic fashion,” Lacey said.

Publishers’ repeated use of live blogs or update pages last year also reminded them of the formats’ strengths. For one: search engines like them.

“The ‘live’ page has an unchanging URL,” explained Rich Gordon, director of the media innovation and content strategy specialization at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism.

“This means that the publisher can link from that page, to multiple related stories, as they are updated over time. And the publisher can also link to that page — for instance on social media or from an email newsletter — and be confident that the page will have the latest information on it.”

Live formats also indirectly address a problem many news publishers have struggled with, particularly as they’ve tightened their meters and made more of their most sought-after coverage exclusive to subscribers.

Many of the live formats publishers deployed offer a mixture of short updates written by reporters, which are often filled with links later in the day after those reporters and their colleagues have filed longer, more in-depth stories on those topics. The short updates, which can touch on a …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron