Digest 03/08/2023

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Information Overload: My Life As A Liveblogger

On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. I remember the moment it happened — not because I was there, but because I was the sole journalist in charge of closely following the invasion at several online news outlets. It was around 7 PM local time in Los Angeles when Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the start of a “special military operation,” and so I was probably contemplating making a quick dinner when the war started. I published the breaking news on four virtual front pages as quickly and diligently as I could, given how little was known. 

Shortly after Putin’s speech, air strikes began. News came from everywhere all at once: press agencies, other outlets, and locals  on the ground trying to make sense of what was happening on social media. Each publication I work for has a playbook ready for this very moment that outlines what to publish first and who to call. Real-time updates are of the essence. As soon as my colleagues started popping into our work chat, they did what we now collectively do in digital media when a massive story hits: they created a liveblog. 

As a media worker, I split my time between working as a US correspondent for Dutch media and as an online news editor where I do a lot of liveblogging. I remember a time before the blogs, when my primary task was writing news stories with a beginning, middle, and end, but can no longer envision a work day without them. Where I work, “the Ukraine blog,” as we call it, makes its way into the Top 5 of best read articles on the site most days. In the age of information fatigue, I’m pleased that people want to stay informed about world news events. At the same time, I wonder how filling these blogs, day after day, impacts both news gathering and the people tasked with doing it.

Liveblogs are often updated before regular news stories — which require context and background, original sources, and diligent copy editing — appear online. They are also the place where I’ve written “This information has not yet been independently verified” more times than I can count. I’ve tacked this sentence onto news about bombs, deaths, refugees, and threats of nuclear attacks. 

The war is very real, and though I’m a foreign news correspondent who covers the US, I have never reported from a war zone, which creates a disconnect. I’ve wondered if I’m the only person who feels it.

I asked around, trying to find other livebloggers who would be open to sharing their experiences. I came up short until I connected with John*, a fellow online news editor at a different European outlet. 

Just like me, John works freelance. And just as I have, he has experienced both the heaviness and the pressure of shuttling an endless stream of new information into what often feels like a liveblog-shaped vortex that goes largely unchecked. Neither of our contributions are evaluated by an editor before we hit “publish,” which isn’t surprising considering the general speed at which liveblogs operate these days.

Though it feels like these blogs were always around, their ubiquity is relatively recent. In the late 1990s, The Guardian began publishing liveblogs about sports, and their first liveblog about a general news event was published in 2008. Other newspapers didn’t fully incorporate liveblogs into their day-to-day online coverage until several years later. For instance, it wasn’t until 2015 that The New York Times began to use liveblogging as an integral part of their news coverage during events like the Paris terror attacks. Not only were they a useful medium to keep readers from all over the world in the loop, their minute-by-minute updates could also help keep people on the ground safe as major events unfolded.

Liveblogs have become a cornerstone of the 24-hour news cycle perhaps because of their seamlessness and digestibility. Their rise in popularity coincided with legacy media investing heavily in their online output and consumers’ ever-increasing demand for content. I’m not sure it’s possible to separate the ascent of liveblogs from our obsessive use of social media like Twitter and TikTok, which also provide real-time updates and a similar dopamine hit as the rush I get when we go “live.”

The ongoing news event that truly cemented liveblogs as the way to quickly get information out was the pandemic. John’s first experience as a liveblogger came then, during the early days of COVID-19, when nobody knew what was going on and most people were stuck at home. Every major news source, from BBC, to The Guardian, to The New York Times — went all-in on real-time updates. 

“When the blogs first started,” John told Study Hall, “I remember wondering: ‘What are we doing here?’” This style of reporting was new to him. “In the beginning, I felt excited to be updating [liveblogs] with news from all over the world on this minute-to-minute basis. Time was very much of the essence, it made me feel like I was doing important work”, John said. But working like this during a public health emergency also caused stress. “With the coronavirus, I felt like what I wrote could have an impact on what people did.” As such, he experienced anxiety about his contributions to the blog being taken out of context, and thus feeding the purported “fake news” cycle.

John’s concerns come from a real place. In cases of breaking news, information shared by press agencies, governments, and armies is sometimes disseminated before it is fact-checked or run by experts. In both a war scenario and a public health emergency, what’s a blogger to do? Aside from adding disclaimers and context where time allows, unfortunately not much, says John. “Most of what I post, I’m unable to personally fact-check.” He hopes that at this point, readers know the difference between a blog, with its breathless, less nuanced quality, and a thorough piece of analysis or investigative reporting.

The liveblogging format doesn’t allow for much down time, either. We are expected to churn through batches of horrific events with little time to process. It’s been tough for John at times, he said, and I share that experience. “It’s so heavy because nine times out of ten, the news is just awful. Especially during the strict [COVID] lockdowns I was under, it made me feel somber,” said John.

After 15 years in journalism and at least seven years working with liveblogs,  I still don’t know how freelancers can balance this heavy work in a sustainable way. We don’t get any of the same benefits as our full-time colleagues, including paid personal days which can be used for mental health breaks. John said that editors at the publications for which he blogs checked in with him during the pandemic to see how he was holding up mentally. “There was no additional monetary compensation, but it’s nice that they asked,” he said. 

I don’t recall the company I work for doing the same. Rather, I feel an implicit expectation that we, as journalists, should appreciate the opportunity to report on events of world-historical importance. And while I love covering a breaking news event, freelance media workers deserve more consideration, especially when covering breaking news that stretches from months into years, like a pandemic or a war. 

A 2015 report from the DART Center for Journalism & Trauma at Columbia Journalism School found that the majority of journalists witness traumatic events in their line of work. While most of the experiences reported were in-person events, journalists can also experience work-related traumatic content via “frequent, repeated and prolonged exposure to something like violent video footage,” according to the report. I often don’t notice the psychological toll of liveblogging until I come down from the high of a busy news shift and am laying in bed, mind still whirring. I’ve asked for higher wages in the past, and rarely received them. And having little to no job security, I worry that if I openly talk about the impact of covering high-intensity events, my bosses will believe I’m not cut out for this line of work. 

Many livebloggers, including John and I, work remotely.  We do not sit in editorial meetings where presumably, an editor could help demystify the importance of our content. Also, we’re responsible for our own maintenance and aftercare, which further isolates us from our colleagues. “It’s not easy to figure out what’s expected of us. After all of these years, I’m still having a hard time figuring that out,” John said. “Nobody has ever told me, ‘This is why we do it, this is why it matters.’” 

Yet, the reality is that readers become accustomed to what we create. At this point I’m uncertain if readers prefer liveblogs, or if they’re just  used to them. When it comes to covering the war in Ukraine, I can feel myself becoming desensitized to the barrage of updates, the longer it goes on. It might not be so different for our readers  —  they still consume these  updates and are informed, but does all of this information truly make an impact?

Due to the rise of social media and legacy outlets’ unflinching desire to thrive online, the 24-hour news cycle shows no signs of slowing down, and in my personal experience, demands on journalists working in the online space have only increased in recent years. I stick around for the paycheck, but also because even though I still write for print, I’ve developed a fascination with the way the online news landscape is developing, especially in an age of disinformation.

The way I see it, this medium isn’t going anywhere. And while I question the liveblogs’ lack of context and emphasis on speed, especially at a time when media literacy is on the decline, it’s ultimately up to me to decide whether to continue working in online news.

Perhaps this is why I’ve been so attracted to the idea of writing an essay about liveblogs, where I can tease apart the reporting choices we make online and how they affect both media workers and our audience, in a way that I could never do in an actual blog. 

After all, a good, easily digestible post is rarely more than five paragraphs long. I should know. 

 

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COMINGS AND GOINGS 

—Adam Sternbergh is joining The New York Times’ Opinion section. He will be working as a culture editor for guest essays.

—Suzy Exposito, who joined Los Angeles Times in 2020, is now a culture columnist for the paper’s Latino Initiatives. 

—John Carreyrou, who helmed investigations into Theranos in 2015 and 2016 for The Wall Street Journal, is hopping over to The New York Times’ Business Investigation team. Carreyrou left the Journal in 2019. 

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EVERYTHING ELSE

—Is media pivoting to consuming paper… on a plane? AIR MAIL plans to produce a print magazine and a line of cookbooks, according to Axios. The digital subscription magazine, which is piloted by former Vanity Fair EIC Graydon Carter, published a dubious profile of Armie Hammer in February. 

—Semafor reports that sources in the Trump 2024 campaign believe that Fox News instituted a “soft ban” on the former president after fanning the flames of MAGAMANIA for years. But according to this extremely awkward clip of random customers interviewed by a Fox correspondent in a Florida diner, the GOP base doesn’t particularly care about what Rupert Murdoch wants. In the words of JoJo, “You know it’s just too little too late.” 

—Last week, A.G. Sulzberger, chairman and publisher of The New York Times, delivered his annual address to employees. Following recent backlash against the Grey Lady’s reporting on trans issues, Sulzberger used the occasion to give a special shout-out to Emily Bazelon’s work and disagreed with how “outside groups” tried to “discredit” their coverage. 

—Vox is closing two of its verticals: Recode, which was devoted to tech, and The Goods, which was devoted to culture and money. In a statement, technology editor Adam Clark Estes said that coverage will now fall “under the Vox banner.” 

—Following Rolling Stone’s scathing exposé into the perpetual disaster that is HBO MAX’s yet-to-be-released-drama-series “The Idol,” The Weeknd, a producer and star on Sam Levinson’s latest high-budget nightmare, clapped back by posting a scene on Twitter in which his character and Lily-Rose Depp’s Jocelyn mock the outlet’s supposed irrelevance. In response to The Weeknd, a Rolling Stone staff writer tweeted a reaction image of a monkey looking surprised and then later deleted the post after being accused of racism. “That clearly wasn’t my intention,” the writer clarified.