Reading Journal 9/24/10 - The Art of Live Blogging

Reading Journal 9/24/10 - The Art of Live Blogging

ON Friday September 20, 2010, Comedian Stephen Colbert testified before a House subcommittee on immigration. Colbert recently worked with United Farm Workers, participating in their “Take Our Jobs” program—“which challenges U.S. citizens to replace immigrants employed by farms.”

The Huffington Post blogger Jason Linkins, live blogged the event posting updates nearly every five to ten minutes. A few things I recalled from Robert Mackey’s talk to the class about live blogging led me to notice what was effective about Linkins particular use of live blogging in comparison to Mackey’s.

First of all, the posting frequency was something I found particular interesting since Mackey had advised to stay away from blogging incessantly. Linkins, on the other hand rarely went longer than ten minutes without a new update. In Linkins case, Colbert’s testimony was the main draw for his readers (C-SPAN 3 is not usually TiVo’d among college students), which can be contributed to explaining the number of postings in a relatively short span of time. The session roughly started around 9:40 AM and the blogging ends after coverage of Colbert at 11:40 AM. All together, Linkins posts 20 updates during this time period. He succeeds providing context before Colbert’s testimony, Colbert’s actual testimony, as well as his responses to the questions that followed.

Although twenty is a lot for a two-hour period, I felt many of his posts were merely trying to keep up with Colbert’s quit witticisms (which again, was the central draw to his blog). However, there were also posts, that when compared to Mackey’s blogs and his remarks in class, were irrelevant to the rest of the blog. One of them being a posting of the YouTube video “Raining in Port Arthur” by The Gourds, “an alternative country band formed in Austen, Texas,” included on the sole basis that congressman Ted Poe represents Port Arthur, Texas. Other unneeded information included remarks sucks as “John Conyers left his Mike on, so I hear him mumbling?”

Overall, this is The Huffington Post, and Linkins is allowed to be more conversational and even down right opinionated—“King takes up the same dumb procedural beef that Lungren did…”—than what we would expect from a more respected online news periodical such as The New York Times and Mackey’s featured blog. However, Linkins takes advantage of the casual attitude allotted to him by the inclusion of visuals completely irrelevant to the central story, and unneeded commentary takes away from the main event, which is still Colbert’s testimony.