Staying on top of fast-moving news events
Live blogs are an integral part of the Guardian’s journalism. They are a great way to capture peoples’ attention and report on unfolding events.
Live blogs were originally called “minute-by-minute” and enabled the sports desk to cover the latest developments in a game or match. The tooling evolved and was adopted by other areas in Editorial. The news desk began producing live blogs in 2008, which rapidly gained popularity due to their ability to provide better coverage of hearings such as the 2009 Iraq war inquiry.
As the Journalism lead, I worked with a cross-functional team to find innovative ways of making them more useful for both readers and editorial.
GNM press office (2022, Jan 27). The Guardian’s Politics Live blog with Andrew Sparrow celebrates its 2,500th edition. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/gnm-press-office/2022/jan/27/the-guardians-politics-live-blog-with-andrew-sparrow-celebrates-its-2500th-edition
Providing context
Pinned post
As the Guardian’s digital editor, Claire Phipps explained: “The most common reader frustration with live blogs is that they click on them expecting to read a post relating to the headline, but then can’t easily find that post. By pinning the most relevant post to the top of the live blog, readers can instantly see the key news/sport/other lines, before reading the rest of the blog.”
This was further validated by our research. We heard in interviews that readers could be easily confused when first arriving on the page and often felt a disconnect between the headlines and the first post in a fast-moving story. Having a pinned post at the top of the page would provide readers with easy access to the most important recent developments.
Catch-up quickly
User studies revealed that as a story develops, identifying key plot points in dense narratives requires significant effort. We explored routes that proactively guide viewers' attention to the most important developments, minimising cognitive strain and deepening engagement. Editorial therefore needed the ability to switch between minute-by-minute coverage to being able to highlight main events (“key events”) in the story and offer visitors an overview (“summaries”).
Timelines
A glance at the timeline with its key events and summaries gives visitors a quick grasp of the story's flow. They can instantly pinpoint major plot points and seamlessly jump between them.
Reducing the noise
Smart filtering
Live blog users expressed concern about information overload due to the volume of content. We investigated filtering options to showcase key events or updates focused on specific topics. Identifying key events was relatively straightforward as they were categorised as a distinct content type. However, detecting entities like places, people, and companies within live blog posts posed a scalability challenge. Adding a manual tagging step to the publishing workflow was not feasible.
I collaborated with data scientists and engineers to experiment with Named Entity Recognition (NER), a technique in natural language processing. By automatically tagging entities at the post level, we laid the groundwork for smart filtering features. We could then provide a way for readers to conveniently follow specific topics of interest, like their local area, in an election results live blog.
Accessibility and inclusivity
The Journalism team’s mission is to deliver news experiences to the widest audience possible without compromising the clarity of information. While the majority of in-page interactivity on the web is reliant on Javascript, the team was keen to make these features available even when Javascript was turned off.