…With Vaguely Related Tech Doc Recommendations

I understand why “live coverage” news blogs are useful in some circumstances: incremental coverage of speeches or hearings or timely updates to a high-profile developing story. But live coverage or live update formats are abused for many other use cases and, in my opinion, they obstruct clarity.

There’s relevance for technical writing here, too. (Admittedly, it’s a stretch, but hear me out.)

Here are my hot takes on the ways the live news blog format fails to provide useful reporting:

• The format is backward. When I open the page, the most recent or specific details are at the top, and I have to read backward through the reporting. This is convenient for reporting, but it either assumes I’m following along from the beginning (who had time for that?) or wants me to scroll all the way to the bottom to catch up.
• Mixed-up topics. Live blogs work if the entire page is about incremental coverage of a single topic, but I frequently see the format abused as a conveyor belt of newly published, unrelated stories. Those unrelated topics in the middle of a live blog distract from the “developing story” and effectively bury the unrelated stories.
• If a story is worth reporting, give it the dignity of its own page and a headline in the appropriate section of the site. Make it discoverable outside of the live blog. Remember that users scan the front page and section page headlines to get a high-level read of the news.

CNN’s recent live coverage of the Firefly Blue Ghost lunar landing is an example of an okay use case (and execution) of the live blog format: Highlights: Firefly ‘Blue Ghost’ lunar lander touches down on the moon. It provides a straightforward link to the summary reporting but could use a better table of contents to provide a timeline and details of the reporting within the original content.

Here’s a pretty poor example from the Washington Post today: House tees up vote on censuring Rep. Al Green for disrupting Trump’s speech.

• The headline claims, “House tees up vote on censuring Rep. Al Green for disrupting Trump’s speech,” so I expect a tick-tock of house developments, but…
• The page’s content consists of capsule items summarizing (and linking to other stories about) federal real estate, proposed VA layoffs, the Department of Education, and DOGE. There’s just one item on censuring Rep. Green, but…
• If I were looking at the URL slug for context, I’d see “trump-presidency-news-speech,” which seems related to the president’s address to Congress but is completely unrelated to any of the items in the live blog.

Mostly, I want to complain about how annoying it is to read “Live News” reporting on the web. But there are lessons for technical communication as well.

• Order matters. Don’t assume prior knowledge or actions. If context or prerequisites are important, provide a table of contents or call out and link the necessary steps. If users land on a midpoint via, say, search, make it easy for them to get to the right starting point.
• Organization matters. Keep related topics together for easy browsing and discovery.
• Discoverability matters. Users infer a lot about your product and its usage patterns from a high-level view of your documentation.
• Blogs are great! They are an excellent format for publishing bite-size technical content as part of a marketing effort. However, make sure they link into your docs appropriately. Blog posts offer an easily shared and SEO-friendly way to invite users into more expansive experiences supported by guides and tutorials.

Make docs and news easy to follow and discoverable. Your readers will thank you.