How should news websites cater for the appetite of news-hungry audiences for running commentary during major breaking stories like Iran’s post-election turmoil? The challenge here is to match what TV stations can do when they switch between news bulletins to rolling 24 hour coverage. Only the web ought to be able to do so much more given its scope for interactivity.

In an ideal world you’d want to provide the fastest, most thoroughly verified reports around the clock whether they or not they are from conventional journalists.  And as a user I think you’d also want to be pointed in the direction of where you can find out more. If all this was easy then it would have been done by now. But it’s a lot of work. And all news organisations have had to strike compromises on one or more of those counts.

So what’s the state of the art?

The live blog

The Guardian (live news blog), the NYT (the Lede Blog), the Atlantic (Andrew Sullivan) and the Huffington Post (Nico Pitney) are among those media organisations using this approach to sample the best material across the Web. This method allows blog anchors to annotate content and to point out whether there are doubts or not about its accuracy. It also allows them to point to the originating sources to help participants make up their own minds.

But running these live blogs around the clock is a heavy commitment. And all four had sizable breaks in their coverage.