ABSTRACT
The British national newspaper award for Political Journalist of the Year was presented in 2011 to Guardian political correspondent, Andrew Sparrow. Not for his contributions to the paper, but for his meticulous live blogging of the 2010 UK General Election on the Guardian website. During an election campaign dominated by the country’s very first series of televised leadership debates, his blog provided an online meta-narrative of the day’s events as they unfolded—combining his own and fellow Guardian correspondents’ analysis and commentary with a curation of news reports, links, blogs and social media. Indeed, one of the examples used in Sparrow’s submission to the Press Awards was his live blogging of the televised debates, further demonstrating the intertextuality of the practice and synergies with other media platforms. With entries sometimes up to 14,000 words long, Sparrow’s election live blog attracted between 100,000 and 150,000 page views on a typical day, with a peak of around 2 million page views on election night (Sparrow, 2010). At most the live blog received some 335,000 unique visitors, around 34,500 more than the Guardian’s daily newspaper circulation at the time. Those visitors also contributed several hundred comments each day, with some readers even providing “useful material” for the blog and responding to questions from the journalists.
