Whether politics or sport, there are many instances of live text reporting. These live texts are quite useful when you are busy and do not have access to television or radio, or following multiple sources at the same time. For example, I managed to keep my eye on the US presidential election as the results and predictions came in on a number of different news websites. Or you can keep up with the cricket. In most cases, you need to refresh the browser manually — the BBC used a system that automatically updated the web page when something was added to the page during the Olympic Games in Beijing, but the corporation seems to have discontinued the experiment.
There is one browser that allows you to set an automatic reload at a specified interval: Opera (right mouse click: reload every ...). Hopefully other browsers will offer this function in their future versions, but using Opera may be the only way to avoid repetitive strain injury for avid followers of election results, or test match cricket.