Writing about an operation on a baby's heart as it happened allowed us to respond to what readers want to know
Last Thursday a baby girl less than two weeks old underwent complex surgery on her tiny, walnut-sized heart. I was there in the Great Ormond Street operating theatre, dressed in scrubs and tweeting live updates from my phone. Our NHS blog captured it all from anaesthetic to success.
The response was overwhelmingly positive, but two valid questions were raised on Twitter.
I want to offer some brief points in response. The first benefit of live reporting is that it reduces the filtering process. At that moment when the surgeon's giant fingers are threading tubes through this tiny creature, what I am writing is just raw emotion. There is no chance to take scribbled notes back to an office to reanalyse or glamorise before committing them to print. In short, live reporting doesn't just mean getting the news faster; it also alters the nature and content of what we produce in quite an exciting way.
That visceral reporting is important, because in the last six weeks of blogging about the NHS, the health service can seem more like a political football than a life saver. Capturing the brute reality of surgery in real time puts things in perspective. Yes it was intense, but it was understood that if there was a serious complication, I would leave the room. Full parental and hospital permission was sought, and we kept the child anonymous.
The second reason for live blogging only became truly apparent once we started: it builds community. By publishing live updates, we were able to generate a huge debate on Twitter and online - our Twitter feed was trending in London and throughout the UK. The Media Blog celebrated it here. People were genuinely moved by this baby girl's gripping story, and many of those who got in touch either had children who had gone through the same surgery or were about to.
When I spoke to the baby's parents after the event, they appreciated the real time support and made it quite clear that they would have loved to have read an account like ours before the event. They said it would have made the process much more transparent and accessible for them:
Live reporting has a third advantage. It allows readers to ask questions and have them answered as the event unfolds. For example, there were various online debates about the size of the baby's heart (walnut vs apricot?) and how risky the surgery really was. If people like arslan do have reasonable questions about voyeurism, this gives them a chance to ask them in real time, rather than after the event when it's too late to do anything about it.
Similarly, live blogging meant we could react to our audience and produce spin-offs that suited them. After the event there was so much interest in the story, I decided to stick around and visit the rest of the ward, meet the family and give a further update on the baby's progress. You can't adapt your content like that if you filmed the whole thing two months ago. Even as you read this piece now, the baby girl is still in the hospital ward making her recovery.
The immediacy of our presentation of her situation forces us to engage with it, and we're proud to continue telling her story.
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