A Rush of News: Behind The New York Times’s Live Coverage

The Times mainly uses two types of live formats. A fast-moving blog, in which the latest information appears at the top, allows for short comments by reporters interspersed with concise reported items, a format used for the Derek Chauvin trial and the Emmy Awards. Briefings, which have an index of their entries at the top, “are more of a synthesis of a big story, a little higher altitude,” Mr. Lacey said.

“A blog is like a fire hose of news,” Melissa Hoppert, a deputy editor for the Live team, said. “A briefing is a curated experience with takeaways at the top: Here’s what you need to know if you read only one thing on the subject all day.”

The Times has experimented with live blogs for about a decade, and it turned to live coverage to report on momentous events like the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015. The Times published its first daily coronavirus briefing on Jan. 23, 2020, and has not stopped since, making it the organization’s longest running 24-hour live briefing.

The reader demand for live coverage, especially the coronavirus briefing, which recently surpassed 900 million page views, led The Times to create the Live team.

Producing the daily live briefings requires collaboration among dozens of editors, reporters and researchers around the world: The coronavirus briefing, for instance, is a 24-hour relay involving multiple time zones and three hubs in Seoul, South Korea; London; and New York.

The editors overseeing the briefings stay in constant contact through video conferences as well as email, multiple encrypted apps, internal chat groups and Google Docs.

“It’s intense,” Ms. Hoppert said of working a briefing shift during a fast-breaking news event. “You’re essentially figuring out what’s going on at the same time readers are.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/22/insider/live-coverage.html