Nearly three months after Mathew Ingram took on his new role as communities editor at The Globe and Mail, he and the online team have been “experimenting” with liveblogs.

Most recently, the team liveblogged the story of a downtown Toronto shooting.

The following day, Ingram reflected on the experience and its value. He wrote:

“All in all, I think it was a worthwhile experiment…It was a spur-of-the-moment decision to do the live blog, and so we
were playing catch-up for much of it, and making shotgun decisions on
what to do and what not to do.”

Ingram readily admitted they missed a few things along the way and that he received criticism from some readers who felt a liveblog wasnt’ appropriate for a shooting. But overall, he wrote:

“In terms of the big picture, I’m glad we’re experimenting with things like this (and the Public Policy Wiki,
which we launched last week), because I think it makes us more flexible
and it reaches different readers in different — and potentially
interesting — ways. Some people likely preferred to just read the
updated news story about the shooting, which we had available in the
traditional way and which was updated regularly with all the same audio
and video. But I think there is something about the immediacy of a blog
that appeals to a lot of people.”