A live blog is quick to set up. Whether it works is decided beforehand: who writes, what goes at the top, where it appears on your site, and do your readers know it exists? This guide goes through the steps in order. What a live blog actually is, is explained in our guide What is a live blog?.
1. Define the occasion and the goal
Before you open any tool, answer three questions:
- What is the live blog for? An election night needs different entries than a conference or a product launch.
- How long will it run? Two hours of press conference or three days of trade fair make a difference to staffing and rhythm.
- Who are you writing for? Readers who follow every minute, or readers who catch up later? That decides how much headlines and a good summary at the top matter.
2. Choose your tool
You can run a live blog as a regular article you keep updating by hand, build your own system or use ready-made live blog software. For most newsrooms, organisers and companies, software is the shortest route: your team writes entries, and the live blog appears on your page through a snippet of code and keeps itself current.
When choosing, look at how it is embedded (directly in your page or as an iframe), privacy, an app for writing on the move, and price. The criteria are summed up on our page about live blog software.
3. Prepare the live blog
- Title and summary: The title says what it is about. The summary at the top explains the state of play in two or three sentences and is updated during the event.
- Roles in the team: Who writes on site, who adds context at the desk, who checks? Clear arrangements prevent duplicate entries.
- Prepare entries: Background, schedule, names and figures can be written in advance and saved as drafts or scheduled for a set time.
- Collect the building blocks: Links to background articles, pictures, the spelling of names. On the night itself there is no time to look for them.
4. Embed the live blog on your site
Create a page or an article where the live blog should appear, with a short introduction above it. Then paste your tool’s code where the live blog should be. On WordPress this usually works with a block or a shortcode, as described in our guide How to add a live blog to WordPress.
Test the live blog on a phone and a computer before you start: does it appear in the right place, does the design fit your site, do new entries arrive without reloading?
5. Announce the live blog
A live blog nobody knows about has no readers. Announce it in good time: on your home page, in your newsletter and on social media, each with the link to the live blog page. For a fixed start time, a countdown on the page works well. Our free event countdown embeds with two lines of code.
6. Write live
Now the live blog itself begins. One entry per event, short sentences, headlines for the key moments, quotes verbatim and with a name. Detailed tips are in our guide How to write a live blog.
7. Close it properly
End the live blog with a final entry that sums up and points to the rest of your coverage. Update the summary at the top to the final state. The live blog then stays online as an archive, and you can link to it from your report.