Vox Media networks on Chorus can use the live blog option.
Marking a story as “live” adds additional metadata to its web page, which can help Google and other search engines highlight developing news and show the most timely content to searchers.
To mark a story, stream, or package as a live blog, head over to the Finalize screen, then:
- Select the toggle for Mark as live blog
- Select a start time for when the story will be live. By default, this will match the publish time, but you can set it for a later time if it makes sense for your story.
- Optionally set an end time. For instance, if you’re covering an event that you know is scheduled to run for an hour, you could fill in that tentative time. You can always edit it later.
- Publish or republish the story.
- If you didn’t set the end time up front, you can select Add end time at any point, and fill in a time.
- Publish or republish the story as needed.
How it works
These stories won’t display any differently to audience members on our sites, but may display with a special presentation on search engine results pages. This can lead to an increase in click-through-rate and improve a story’s reach in search.
Live coverage start and end times will be noted in the story history. Stories that are live at the moment will also display an icon in the Chorus dashboard.
You can remove the live blog metadata from a story at any time, before or after publishing, by turning the toggle back off.
Recommendations
The live blog toggle can be used to optimize a story about a big event, such as an Apple keynote or Black Friday, or about unplanned developing news.
Stories that are regularly updated with new information—either through republishing the story or via a third-party liveblogging embed—are good candidates for the live blog metadata. Streams and packages can be marked live as well, if you’re planning to add to them frequently.
Don’t let your audience down on the promise of live news. These types of stories are good candidates for the live blog schema:
- Rapidly evolving, frequently updated news stories
- Real-time coverage of an event, until there are no further updates
- Ecommerce sales event stories that are being actively updated
On the other hand, these types of stories should not be marked live:
- News stories that are updated, but not evolving in real-time
- A story previewing an event or a recap after an event is over
- Posts where the updates are mainly user generated content (for example, game threads)
If you’re optimizing your coverage of breaking news and live events, you might also be interested in our recommendations around streams, which are good candidates for the live coverage toggle, and timestamps, which can be updated when a story has new content.