At a NICAR 2018 panel on the future of live coverage, the “Live Chat” platform was debated in the context of other popular forms of live coverage including Live Blogs and Live Annotation. The New York Times beat us to it in 2015, and newsrooms have been working on similar platforms ever since. I’ll admit: we weren’t the first ones to come up with this idea. As the (self-titled) LA Times Slack developer intern, I got to work. Well…we could…quite easily actually thanks to Slack’s APIs. What if we could use Slack, a tool most reporters were already familiar with using, to power live up-to-the-second content. I had just finished my Slack homepage buttons (a toolkit for managing our homepage from Slack) and was brought in to provide insight on the platform (I think). On a summer day in 2017, this was the question on all of our minds as we met with Megan Garvey, who was then the Deputy Managing Editor for Digital at the Los Angeles Times. We should be able to provide Twitter’s speed on our own. Well, we’ve learned definitively in the past few months that we can’t solely rely on these platforms to publish for us.

Speed is also why we break stories on Twitter-why during live events reporters have just as much of a presence on Twitter as they do on the publication’s website. We publish what we can as soon as we can. That’s why we don’t wait for the print deadline anymore, and it’s why liveblogs exist. If there’s one thing journalists aim to provide, it’s relevant content as fast as possible.

Django slack bot