How the media covered Thatcher's death: liveblogging

Patrick Smith Storified the traditional media coverage of Thatcher’s death. The key take-away? Liveblogging is the main way the nationals are covering events like this. It’s odd, because a majority of journalisms still seem to regard liveblogging as a niche activity, whereas it’s very clearly front and centre in the mainstream of news coverage right now. Yet, I see even journalism students regarding liveblogging as an annoying necessity before they move onto the “real” job of writing a traditional inverted pyramid story.

Pre-internet, you ran a news story, an obit, and lots of reaction or analysis pieces. Post-internet, you can bring together all the disparate piece of publication, reaction and news into an on-going narrative – and link to the more traditional story formats as your produce them. The skill is not just in aggregating stuff, but in building a narrative out of it.