Nieman Foundation at Harvard
The Guardian has a new setup for its liveblogs that aims to fix some of their eternal problems — chief among them that they’re great for in-the-moment following along, but cryptic and unnavigable after the fact:
Paul Owen, who is responsible for the Guardian’s UK live blogs, said: “Once live blogs have been going for more than an hour or two, it becomes difficult for a new reader to start reading; by that point the live blog has often become rather long and unwieldy.
“For a while we have asked the live bloggers to periodically add bullet-point summaries of key events – say at the beginning of the blog, half way through the day, and when wrapping up. But these only really help if the new reader starts reading the blog soon after a summary has been published.
“So we hope pulling up key events into a clickable list at the top or top left of each live blog will now help readers navigate through a live blog at whatever point they choose to join it. Summaries will remain too, though.”
You can see an example of the new look here. I rather like it; the commenters under that post don’t.
