Live Blog 2.0 for Journalists
Verifying content
Live Blog enables your news organisation to draw in content from many external sources. But what if some of this content turns out to be irrelevant, inaccurate, or worse? This can be a particular issue with items originating from social media such as Twitter, and with material contributed directly to your live blog by the public via the comments and SMS feeds.
To help you manage this problem, Live Blog has a new feature which makes it possible for editors to assign items to colleagues for verification, and for a verification status to be set on each item when it has been checked.
Verification is disabled by default in a newly created Live Blog. A user with editor or administrative privileges should switch it on in the configuration section. See the chapter Configuring your live blog.
When verification is enabled, two new controls appear on every item which has been published to the timeline, as well as on items in the chained blogs tab. In the form of drop-down menus, these are the verification status control and the assignment control.
This is how the controls look by default:
The verification status control is on the left. When clicked, the following options are revealed: No Status, Verified, Unverified, and On verification.
The assignment control is on the right. When the control is clicked, a list of users is revealed. Scroll through or search to find the user to whom you wish to assign the item for verification.
When you have assigned the item to a user, the user's name appears in the assignment control.
It is not possible to 'unassign' an item completely, but you can choose to assign it to a different user.
Using a chained blog for verification of SMS
It is possible to verify incoming SMS messages before they are published by setting up two blogs, one chained to the other.
A staging instance is created for the ingest of SMS messages, while a second, production instance is created for publication. The staging blog is then chained to the production blog.
(To learn how to create a live blog, see the chapter Creating and publishing a live blog. For an explanation of how to chain live blogs, see the section 'Chained Live Blogs tab' in the chapter Creating content and using sources.)