“Absolutely no structure at all”: livestreams and newsblogs
I’ve previously hinted that I find Twitter streams from events of little use post-event. I’ve tried out some curation tools, with much the same response – unless a fair amount of intellectual effort goes into ordering and annotating your material you might as well look at a transcript – or wait for someone else to write a blog post.
The problem is that a stream has no structure, and hence makes little or no sense. See this description of the Guardian newsblog on the earthquake in New Zealand
We get the who, what, where information as brief bullet points at the top, with the eye-catching photo of the now spire-less Christchurch Cathedral, but what follows has absolutely no structure at all..
.It’s a mish-mash of baffling tweets, irrelevant musings from the Guardian’s comments, contact details for those who want to find out about loved ones or make donations (including one from the New Zealand Red Cross, who actually says it doesn’t want donations just yet, and another from the Auckland University Students’ Union, the relevance of which escapes me), musings from a boffin at that world renowned centre of earthquake research, Bristol University, and speculation on how the tragedy might affect the Rugby World Cup, due to kick-off in NZ in seven months’ time.
Scattered meagrely throughout, like sixpences in a Christmas pudding, are bits of what you and I might call “hard news”.
via Amplify.comLive coverage is great, but it should only be the start of your coverage. As Martin Belam responded, the live blogging format poses a challenge for information structure. But it seems we are all on more or less the same page – Martin also cites a comment from Andrew Sparrow, the Guardian’s political live blogger:
If journalism is the first draft of history, live blogging is the first draft of journalism.