A New York Times liveblog that starts in Slack and ends in WordPress

Scott Taylor put the flow like this:

Slack > Slack > Invisible City > Redis > Pusher > Web socket > React > WordPress

Those were the steps to make a real time liveblog even more real time. Scott works at the Times and will also be the 4.4 release lead. Nieman Lab has more on the process used and benefits the Times achieved with this workflow — but primarily it made a real time conversation show up on the web to a whole bunch of live blog viewers within seconds, instead of minutes.

“We’ve done it before, but in a Stone Age way, for other live events, with the reporter typing into Gchat, then an editor copying and pasting that text,”Marc Lavallee, editor of interactive news, told me. “It looks the same after-the-fact, but we were minutes behind on events.” Being minutes behind in a liveblog intended to be a “second screen” is not a good thing, and publishing chats directly from Slack cuts that lag down to seconds.

This will absolutely be copied by lots of other organizations. I love the concept and the education.