Leeds live: conventional news?
Leeds live is a new, innovative website which focuses on live and current news relevant to people in the city centre area. They also have a section dedicated to Leeds United football club, with transfer news and match updates. It is very user friendly and you can tell the focus is on digital news.
Their live blog feature is used to share news as the reporters finds it out, in a series of short, real time updates. The article features an opening paragraph and a series of ‘key events’ explaining what topic the live updates are about.
The article I chose to look at was the ‘Leeds 2023' public meeting. The live blog featured tweets from people in Leeds, attending the meeting and figures in the city. This fits with the style of Leeds Live, which aims to be a completely digital and interactive site, as Twitter is. It also gives information from inside the meeting as the reporter finds it out, labelled by the time of the update in the right hand corner.
The live blog style helps the reader to engage with the news and feel as if they are part of it, the short updates make it feel more like a social media platform, where everything is in real time. It engages young people by using tools that they enjoy and find effective, instead of overloading their brains with boring, non-relevent news.
For my conventional piece of news I looked at ‘Leeds School Holidays 2018: What Are the Term Dates?’
This was one of the only non-live blog style article I could find. And as you can see the output of news is very different, it is simple and more public information than a news article, as it does not need updating often or embedded tweets to back up and argument.
Although thought had been put into the article and some journalism was still involved, it did not need as much focus as the live blog, and I feel would attract a lot less views than the public meeting article. However the lay out was still similar and bullet points were used to compress information.
The two articles are both good examples of online news, and Leeds live is a very forward thinking website, aimed at a younger demographic. The live blog helps readers to feel more involved and have their say through comments. If it is live there is the possibility it could be your tweet used in the article.
However, you can see there is still effort made to distribute news in traditional articles, so that there are other options for those who may not like the modern use of news.