The Future of Breaking News Online?

Abstract

This study investigates news readers' use of, participation with, and attitudes to live updating news pages (also known as live blogs); an increasingly common online news format. Data derive from an online survey, and from web analytics of live blogs hosted by Guardian.co.uk and on the ScribbleLive platform. The survey elicited approximately 11,000 respondents and the sample was weighted to reflect the demographics of the online populations in the nine countries polled. The findings show the extent to which news consumers use live blogs to follow news, and, for the United States and United Kingdom, their preferences for different types of news content in this form. UK respondents' attitudes to the accuracy and balance of live blogs, and to their usability and convenience, are reported. The Guardian.co.uk data reveal the relative attention received by live blogs compared with picture galleries, articles, and an op-ed piece; whilst the data from ScribbleLive show the proportion of content contributed by readers in a sample of 11 live blogs. In answering a call for further study of this under-researched aspect of online news, this study extends our understanding of the changes taking place as news consumption shifts, increasingly rapidly, from print to online.

KEYWORDS:

• accuracy
• balance
• content preferences
• live blogs
• reader contributions

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors are grateful to the Reuters Institute and YouGov for permission to use data from the 2013 Digital News survey, and to ScribbleLive and The Guardian for the analytics data on the live blogs they host.

Notes

1. For a detailed discussion on the comparability of measures of reach and attention as applied to online news, see Thurman (2013a).

2. Anecdotal evidence from the editor of the BBC News website indicates that, perhaps because it is viewed more as a definitive website of record, articles are still responsible for the “vast majority of our traffic” and can, “depending on the type and duration of the story”, outperform live pages when run alongside (Steve Herrmann, personal communication, July 20, 2013).

3. See Thurman (2013b) for an explanation.

4. Commenting on the Boston marathon bombings, Mark Thompson, president and chief executive of The New York Times, said: “For the first time continuous TV news has come in second … Now, essentially, Twitter is first” (Perry 2013).

5. Previous research (Thurman and Walters 2013, 91) has shown that, on average, a live blog at Guardian.co.uk lasts six hours and relies on the contributions of over two and a half journalists, some on location.

6. An average of 20 per cent of news consumers across nine countries say they share news via a social network in an average week (Levy and Newman 2013, 66).

7. The values here and in Figure 2 are minimums because, firstly, visits of 15 seconds or less were not counted and, secondly, the lowest value in each time band was used. For example all visits in the 20–30 minutes band were counted as 20 minutes.