What is Live Blog? Q&A: Letizia Gambini, Head of Communications, Sourcefabric.

By Marina Savchenko

The M100 YEJ workshop was covered live for the first time and Live Blog enabled delivering news in real time for all participants.Orange Magazine interviewed Letizia Gambini, Head of Communications, Sourcefabric about the open source code base for journalists, independent journalism and Live Blog.

What is the open source code base for journalists?

Our flagship project is Superdesk, a multimedia newsroom management system that revolutionises the way news are created and published. It’s a software, and it’s open source. Open source means that the code base is publicly available on Github for anyone to “fork” and develop further. Our road map is public and we are open for contributions. In fact, we’re always looking for news organisations to join us as development partners!

What are advantages of open source technologies for modern journalists and why?
We believe that open source can bring a lot of benefits to news organisations, first of all a culture of sharing resources to build the best possible tools to advance not only their journalism but the industry as a whole. At Sourcefabric, we have the ambition to be the custodians of the best open source code base, and let the journalists focus more on what they do best: make the news.

How does Live Blog work? Can it be used by usual journalists or is it possible only for organisations?
Live Blog is our liveblogging software and it can be used by anyone. It’s an editorial environment that supports quick updates on a live feed that you can embed on your website, and also has a mobile app to allow contributions from reporters on the ground.

The M100 YEJ workshop was covered live for the first time and Live Blog enabled delivering news in real time for all participants. How can you evaluate the first collaboration?
Live Blog is perfect to cover live events. The team of M100 YEJ was quick to learn the easy interface of Live Blog and picked up the best features of the tool, especially the immediacy of the reporting and the multimedia options (you can embed any content: images, videos, social media or other services). For us, it was important to confirm once more how easy and intuitive Live Blog is and to promote the use of liveblogging to more news outlets.

How does Sourcefabric support independent journalism?
At Sourcefabric, we are technologists. Our mission is to build the best possible software to support quality independent journalism. In the past 7 years, we have partnered with different news organisations worldwide to provide them software to improve their workflows and developed together with them the technical solutions they needed.
Read more : www.superdesk.org, www.sourcefabric.org