CoveritLive

» see coveritlive.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

the first time i encountered coveritlive was on the side of a news site in the late two thousands, embedded into a story about an apple event or a sports match, scrolling new updates from a journalist sitting in a press box somewhere. i never opened an account. nobody who was not running a news site or a moderately serious blog ever did. the product was b2b in the way a bottling line is b2b. you saw the output everywhere. you never touched the panel that produced it.

coveritlive was a toronto company that turned live-blogging into a hosted widget. you embedded a small block of javascript on your page. inside that block a journalist could post text updates and photos, with polls and reader-submitted questions on top. readers got auto-refreshing updates. the journalist got a moderation panel. for the period roughly between 2008 and 2014 this was how every news site covered a live event that did not warrant tv cameras.

by 2014 the product had been bought by toronto-based scribble technologies and pulled into a broader content-marketing platform. the standalone coveritlive brand stopped getting investment. it limped on as a wind-down product for a few more years and was officially shut off on december 31, 2018.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

bob barnard and keith mcspurren founded coveritlive in toronto in 2007. mcspurren had earlier co-founded salesdriver.com with joel silver. the timing was right. the 2008 us election cycle gave news desks an obvious reason to want a live-blogging tool that did not require any custom engineering. early adopters included the guardian and the new york times on the news side, with espn and mashable on the tech and sports side. by 2009 coveritlive had raised a million dollars from flagstone capital and angel investor paul kedrosky.

the 2010 fifa world cup was the peak moment. a coveritlive press release at the time claimed 146 million page views in thirty days across the live-blogs of news partners. that is the kind of number you can only hit when your widget is the default embed for every major english-language news site covering the same event at once. for a brief window around 2010 and 2011, coveritlive was that default.

~ the embed era ~

demand media took a minority stake in 2009 and bought the rest in february 2011. demand media at the time was a content factory whose flagship was ehow, and the strategic logic was to put coveritlive widgets onto demand media's high-traffic pages. that logic never produced a clean fit. demand media's core business was algorithmic content. coveritlive's core business was real-time human-journalist content. the cultures did not match.

by 2013 demand media had decided live-blogging was not a strategic asset and was looking to spin coveritlive back out. in july 2014 toronto-based scribble technologies, operating as scribblelive, bought it for an undisclosed amount and folded most of the platform into its own. the coveritlive brand limped on for embed-compatibility reasons.

~ the long fade ~

by 2015 every news cms had its own native live-blog feature. the new york times built one. the guardian built one. wordpress had plugins that did the basic version. twitter itself was the live-blog when something was actually breaking. the standalone widget, embedded inside an iframe and loading slowly on mobile, started to feel like an artifact of an earlier web.

scribblelive announced the official end on december 31, 2018. by then the product had not been actively developed for years and most of the major news partners had already migrated off. the death was procedural rather than dramatic. coveritlive was the kind of utility software that gets quietly switched off after everyone has already moved on, which is a fairly common way for b2b tools of the embed era to end.

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