Writing a live blog: 'You're frantically keeping the plates spinning'
by Matthew Weaver from on (#511P1)
What's it like being in charge of a minute-by-minute update on a global pandemic that 7 million people are following?
It started out as a bit of an experiment in 2007, an attempt to take what sports journalists were doing with minute-by-minute coverage of cricket and football and see if it would work with fast-paced news events.
It did. More than a dozen years later, the Guardian's live blog format (a rolling screed of real-time news updates written by journalists like me) is one of our most successful digital innovations ever, prodigiously utilised, much copied - and so well read that it can be daunting for those doing the writing.
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