Coverages

A coverage is a live blog: one page for a single event or story, that grows update by update as things happen, instead of a single post written once and left as-is. It lives inside your publication, next to your regular posts, not as a separate product.

What a coverage actually is

A coverage has a name, a short caption so readers know what they're walking into, and a start date. From there you publish updates into it as the story develops. Each update shows up in the timeline, most recent first, and has its own status, so you can draft the next one without holding up the ones already published.

Starting a coverage

Give it a name and a caption, and set when it starts. Nothing is published yet at that point - a coverage with no updates is just an empty timeline, the same way a book club with no current read is an empty room.

Publishing updates

Publish an update whenever there's something new to say. You don't need the full picture before the first one - that's the point of a coverage over a regular post: readers can follow along from before you have every answer.

Closing a coverage

Once the story is over, set an end date. A coverage that trails off with no final update reads as unfinished; a short closing update - this is over, here's what happened - gives readers somewhere to land.

Coverages and book clubs

A book club's discussion posts - what that page calls a critique - are coverages too, just scoped to the book currently being read instead of an event. It's the same feature either way: a running timeline readers can join partway through and still make sense of.

For more on when to reach for a coverage and how to get the most out of one, see Why your newsletter needs a live blog, and why almost nobody offers one on the blog.