The live blog is dead in the water – it’s time for the news to break out of bad habits

Dmitry Shishkin worked at the BBC for 21 years. He helped to pioneer the broadcaster’s digital offering and devised a question to stress test any news organisation: what would happen if it disappeared tomorrow? This recently resurfaced in an interview that Shishkin gave to Brian Morrissey for The Rebooting Show, a newsletter and podcast dedicated to the business of journalism, during which the former BBC man was briefly befuddled by his own test. Morrissey has his own theory, developed across years of reporting, that news organisations have consistently failed to think about their work as a product: something designed around user need rather than professional habit. That product is not providing updates to live blogs, it’s providing understanding of complicated issues through depth of coverage. 

Case in point is coverage of the current conflict in the Gulf, one of the most structurally complex stories of the decade. It has multiple fronts, rotating actors and compounding consequences. Events in the Strait of Hormuz connect to Houthi targeting doctrine, which connects to Red Sea shipping rates, which connects to insurance markets in London. Following any single thread requires holding several others in your mind simultaneously. The format that large news organisations have typically reached for to help explain what is going on is the live blog. But a linear scroll of time-stamped updates conceived for a single breaking event is unfit for purpose when it comes to covering a multi-theatre, multi-faceted conflict.

Into the space that institutions have left open, a new class of product has arrived. Dozens of AI-powered dashboards that assemble satellite imagery, ship-tracking data and news feeds into something resembling a single story are flooding social media. Craig Silverman, a digital investigations expert who catalogued more than 20 of these dashboards for MIT Technology Review, describes the result as “an illusion of being on top of things”. One dashboard built by two people at Silicon Valley firm Andreessen Horowitz ran a scrolling feed of prediction-market bets on Iran’s next supreme leader alongside the news feed. This is war as a spectator sport – and this time the stakes are clear for all to see. 

The confusion that these products exploit exists only because media institutions have abandoned the field. Aggregating updates is not the same as building understanding. The dashboards offer the former while implying the latter. 

The data on what better looks like is not new. When Shishkin was running BBC Russia, 70 per cent of the output was commodity news that drove just seven per cent of page views. When the team rebalanced, cutting total output by 60 per cent and shifting towards explanation, perspective and context, the audience tripled. This is not a marginal finding. This is a direct challenge to digital newsrooms that still optimise for volume and recency above comprehension.

The New York Times is usually invoked at this point as the exception and it is true that the US title has built genuine product ambition into its bundle. But on the Middle East, even the Old Grey Lady usually defaults to the same format that it was using 10 years ago. The sophisticated reader trying to understand how the conflict’s moving parts connect is left to stitch these together themselves.

Why should readers maintain their news subscriptions when they can follow Substack writers who build context across weeks of posts or former intelligence analysts treating their social media followers as a continuing seminar? Because these are not replacements for institutional journalism; they are proof of concept for a format that barely exists in proper form. A continuously updated briefing on a single strand of the story, authored by someone with genuine specialist knowledge, that accumulates context rather than discarding it each news cycle: call it the “persistent thread”. Beyond that format, the tools already exist: structured topic pages that accumulate rather than reset, audio digests built around explanation rather than headlines, subscriber-only Q&A formats in which domain experts field the questions readers are actually asking. None of this requires new technology. 

Shishkin’s formulation is elegant: story first, user need second, format third. The live blog, on the other hand, is less refined and only gives the sensation of being informed rather than the development of understanding. Solutions exist – knowledge-management software, structured databases, audio production, even a well-maintained Substack – but at the moment the willingness of big news organisations seems absent. And the more complicated the news becomes, the further behind our venerable news organisations will seem. 

Colin Nagy is a Los Angeles-based writer and regular Monocle contributor. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.