Amy Remeikis' Take on Live Blogging

Amy Remeikis, for those of you who haven't heard of her, is the Queensland political editor for the Brisbane Times and shares politics in a highly unique and entertaining fashion. She live blogs the Queensland parliaments Q&A sessions linking relevant and hilarious YouTube videos as well as popular memes. She takes the serious and dry topic and turns it in to a highly digestible source of information. Her blog was an experiment conducted by FairFax in their pursuit for innovation in media.

Check out one of her 'Hey QT' blogs here.

I first heard from Amy last semester as she hilariously spoke of what it was like to be a female in an overly top level male dominated industry. "Is my vagina offending you," comes to mind. Since then I have become a little bit of a fan girl and admired her way with words and passion for the industry. She came to speak with our Online Journalism class on what it was like to live blog an event and how to do it rather successfully.

She started by saying there is nothing crazier than Queensland politics as we have no upper house (I briefly remember learning something about this in the early stage of legal studies in grade 11 but have since let my knowledge of political/legal structures pass me by. I think I will probably need to brush up on that). She then continued by expressing the importance of her job, which is to make politics interesting as it is up to her to give the audience a reason to care.

"Part of my job is to make politics interesting," says Amy.

There is also the crucial element of time management as Amy is expected to get a press conference up on the Brisbane Times website before the conference has actually finished. She also has to manage a live blog for eight hours whilst simultaneously filing between eight and 10 stories for the website. And there is also Twitter, which comes a nice third in her list of priorities.

Remeikis explained that when reporting on issues that don't necessarily deal with life and death, it is important to be able to inject some light into the story. It was extremely refreshing to hear that news doesn't have to be all black and white and there is an opportunity to add some personal humour. In Amy's case it certainly works to her advantage as her live blogs have seen over 20,000 views.

Whilst context remains king in the world of this new form of journalism being able to add some personality will allow future journalists to retain their readership.

I also really liked how she talked about audience interaction and how we are now able to find out just where our readers are coming from. Personally, I would love to know the analytics from my blog and get an idea of how many readers I have (shout out to Wix - the owner of my website - for asking me to pay for the free Google versions).

It seems we now live in a world full of audience interaction where we are not only watching/listening to content but also commenting about it on social media and interacting with others online. This idea of "second-screening" is extremely important in the world of journalism and something that is continually making a mark on the industry. The role of the journalist now has to extend to how they interact with their audiences, ensuring there is some level of participation.

According to Amy the hardest part of live blogging is when nothing has happened. You should be updating your viewers at least every 15 minutes but when the politicians are simply talking jargon there can be nothing to add to the story. This is when summaries, history boxes and commenting on the mood of the scene come into play.

Most importantly journalists have to continue to give back to the audience.

It seems we got through quite a lot in the hour lecture but Amy really did drive home a key message about blogging: your readers should understand who you are as a person.

This was probably one of the main things I could relate to personally as I like to give a little bit of myself in everyone of my posts. I think this blog has become more of a personal reflection than anything else but I like that. I like that I have created a place for my own thoughts and something that I can look back on as I continue my career.

#ashleighdwan #beyondthestory #journalism #onlinejournalism1 #amyremeikis