Archive for 2008

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All bets are… on!

November 28th, 2008

Back in June I made this bet:

I’m willing to bet one of you 50 pounds that one of the major UK newspapers will go completely free within three years.

In fact, I’ll narrow it slightly to the following titles:

The Guardian
The Independent
The Times
The Daily Telegraph
Financial Times
The Sun
Daily Mail
Daily Express
Daily Mirror

So I bet fifty quid that one of the those papers goes free within three years. Anyone fancy a flutter?

And before the year’s out, it appears the Independent is edging ever closer to going online-only. Now, of course, I my bet wasn’t that they’d go online. Rather, it was that they’d have a free print edition. So it’s not quite there yet, but it’s interesting to note that amongst all the redundancies, relocations and cutbacks, humble freesheet Metro is having a makeover in time for Monday. It turns over a profit.

Nigel Barlow took me up on the bet.

And now that the Indy is moving to Northcliffe House — and sharing the same subs that put together the Mail, as well as being only two doors up from the aforementioned Metro — I reckon there’ll be a free print edition very soon. This time next year.

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Posted in Newspapers, The Future, The Web

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Mumbai on the web

November 27th, 2008

I was going to do a big post about all the web posts related to Mumbai, but Journalism.co.uk beat me to it.

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Guardian ‘Message for Obama’ project is published

November 26th, 2008

It’s projects like this that make me sure that the Guardian is indeed the best newspaper in the UK.

On November 5 we started a photographic project, with users of guardian.co.uk and of Flickr, entitled A Message for Obama. The essence of the idea was to see if we could capture reaction to Barack Obama’s presidential victory in a creative way. It started with a few of us taking pictures around the Guardian offices, and snowballed into a Flickr picture group which you can see here.

Just to push the boundaries of collaborative social media and new publishing technologies a little further, we wondered if we could produce a rapid Message for Obama book (a handy inauguration gift for the new President?), using a selection of photos from the pool.

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Posted in Newspapers, Social Networking, The Web

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Regionals: Online memorials a good start

November 26th, 2008

As part of my little experiment monitoring the improvements that need to be made to regional news, I’m going to take a few moments here and there to mention decent improvements. Steps in the right direction, if you will.

Take this effort from the Limerick Leader. An online memorial page, set up for Shane Geoghegan after he tragically died earlier this month.

It’s a great example of harnessing an existing audience using a simple Web 2.0 tool.

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It’s by no means perfect, though. It’s very hard to go from the memorial page to the newspaper’s homepage – meaning any traffic generated by the feature will not be recorded. I’m not for a moment suggesting the motivation for this memorial is to get readers, but it’s a slip up not to include a promient link where people attracted to this site — new, young readers — can click through to the main Leader site.

Now strictly speaking Limerick wouldn’t be affected by a BBC local expansion as it’s in Ireland, but this ‘Announce’ software belongs to Johnston Press. Here’s a similar example for Sunderland.

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Posted in Regional, Social Networking, The BBC, The Web

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D’oh! Facebook phishing protection needs some work

November 26th, 2008

Have you seen the new Facebook phishing protection? It’s an amicable effort to prevent the sorts of phishing attacks that I believe forced many MySpace users to switch to Facebook.

They’re doing all they can to make sure users don’t fall foul to this sneaky practice. Recently, any outbound links from the website are being re-directed via a ‘You’re leaving Facebook’ page. Here’s an example.

Problem is, anyone who uses their webstat applications (I use StatCounter) to track how people are finding their site — very important for all webmasters, not just bloggers — they’ll only get the ‘leaving’ page as their referrer data.

A few seconds before 4 o’clock someone came to this post via a link on Facebook. But when I look back to see where they’ve come from, all I get is this:

ScreenShot017

So I’m none the wiser. It could just be someone clicking via my profile, which happens from time to time, but quite often I’ve had entries linked to via groups about journalism, students or whatever. I’d quite like to know where my blog is being talked about and, if relevant, get involved in the chat.

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Posted in Blogs, Social Networking, The BBC, The Web

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Regionals must abandon ‘one size fits all’ attitude to online

November 22nd, 2008

My last post about the local press was a bit of a rant. Anyone can do that. It takes a better mind to offer some practical advice. So I will attempt that now.

Abandon the ‘one size fits all’ attitude to online – NOW!

Frustrating, aren’t they? Regional news websites, I mean. They all look the same. ThisisLincolnshire. ThisisGloucestershire. ThisisBORING. What’s wrong with LincolnshireEcho.co.uk? Absolutely nothing, that’s what. By giving seperate name and feel, you’re distancing it from the print product.

Sam Shepherd made this comment on my blog earlier this week:

Great idea Dave… but to make those sites LOOK different will take much more than individual papers grasping the nettle. At least two of those groups (probably all but I’ve only worked for two of them) have designed awful, counter-intuituive templates that leave no room for creativity at a regional level.

Newsquest ‘bans’ embedding of iframes or widgets, so the only way you can use sites like Flickr or apps like Cover it Live is to cheat and hope the big bosses don’t notice. We have a maximum display window of 310 pixels so even when we do sneakily embed google maps or dipity timelines you can’t read them.

In your Basildon Echo example, they don’t have access to that second column of white space except to use preset Newsquest panels – on our site, I’d love to have a Twitter widget and a Flickr panel but we can’t.

You don’t expect all regional newspapers to look identical – so why can’t the groups loosen up a bit, let each site work on developing its own version of the basic template that does allow for a bit of design flexibility, proper display of pictures – and most importantly lets us use some of the great tools that are out there? When you read the comments to our site, lots of them complain about how all the newspapers look the same online. It just contributes to the ‘it’s not a local paper, they don;t really care about us’ feeling that many of our readers have.

This goes hand in hand with a comment I remember the editor of the Hull Daily Mail saying in a guest lecture once. A student asked him how he manages to stand out from the crowd and innovate when all the websites in the Northcliffe group look the same. His answer? “With great difficulty.”

Incredible, isn’t it? They really are making it harder for themselves. Worth pointing out the URL for the Hull Daily Mail is, wait for it: thisishullandeastriding.co.uk . Holy crap.

Each of these regionals should have an on-site webmaster. They should be allowed to edit the content, use widgets…. do whatever they please. Adverts may be shifted, yes, but you can bet that more advertisers will want to be on your site when it’s the most popular for local news.

It doesn’t break the budget. All the things Sam mentioned in her comment can be done for free. They only thing stopping them is bigwigs higher up the train who insist that the the right hand column must permanently say “Hundreds of jobs!”.

Perhaps they’re making it easier for all the journalists they’re sacking to find other work.

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Posted in Regional, The Future, The Web

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Magic moments

November 22nd, 2008

Whenever I think of great photography, I constantly think news news news.

A great shot is one that isn’t necessarily technically perfect, but one that captures a defining moment.

Well today I stumbled across this set of pictures. Sometimes it’s nice, when you immerse your working day (and indeed, your non-working day) in news, to remind yourself that just because something isn’t newsworthy, that doesn’t make it any less enthralling.

Beautiful work.

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Guardian: Eastern promise

November 22nd, 2008

If you are looking for tax-free wages and a luxury lifestyle in a booming economy after university – a job in the Gulf could be a great place to start your career, explains Dave Lee

Read it here!

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Posted in My Work, Newspapers, The Web

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Regionals given a lifeline. It’s up to them to use it

November 22nd, 2008

Today the BBC Trust pulled an absolutely stinking howler. With its decision to prevent the BBC from improving local journalism, the only people who are suffering are viewers and listeners.

The money, the Trust said, should instead by used to “improve existing services”. Existing services like, I dunno, local news?

The Trust also concluded that an improved local video service — which would have seen ten clips of hyperlocal news posted online every day in every region — would have a “significant negative impact on commercial providers”.

Ok. There may be a point there. If the BBC are going to be doing great local video, then why would people go to the local newspaper for video as well? After all, the BBC’s national news videos mean that people have stopped visiting Sky News, or the Guardian, or the Telegraph, or the Times, or ITV, or… you get the picture.

Competition ups everyone’s game. If local newspapers offer something unique then people will still come.

The simple truth is this: local newspapers are scared stiff. The likes of Sly Bailey, so critical of the BBC’s plans, clearly has no idea what to do in the next year. In fact, I’ll shorten that to the next six months. She’s got a newspaper group that is flapping its wings about in panic, feathers flying out in all directions.

Pay freezes and job cuts don’t solve the problem. In fact, they put you in a worse position. How will you make any local video content without any bloody staff?

Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to take a screenshot of 4 key local news websites. Over the next few months, I’ll monitor any changes. I’ll see if the local press are rising to the challenge. I’ll stick my neck out a bit here and predict nothing will happen. The designs will stay the same. The production values of multimedia will not improve, and more job cuts will be announced.

You know, in some ways I’m glad the BBC Trust has rejected the plans. Perhaps it’s too early. This way, when local newspapers do absolutely nothing to improve local news, they won’t be able to blame the big bad BBC. It will be their own incompentence. A reluctance to get face the times and sort out their shoddy product.

Screenshots after the jump. I’ll take a look at these after Christmas. Lets see what happens.

» Read more: Regionals given a lifeline. It’s up to them to use it

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Posted in Blogs, Newspapers, TV, The BBC, The Future, The Web

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From newsroom to mailroom

November 21st, 2008

Redundancies are terrifying. Right now, all the news reports are focusing on statistics. 90 lost here, wage freezes there.

Soon we can expect to learn of the human side. The personal losses, the mortgages not paid, the ‘Christmas is cancelled’ stories of once great journos assigned — wrongly — to the scrapheap.

It’s getting so bad, in fact, that blog software company SixApart is offering free Typepad accounts to any journos who have recently been given the chop. They’ll be signed up to the advertising scheme too, meaning they can potentially blog their way into a little money. The emphasis on little.

And I’ve just spotted this on the Reuters Mediafile blog. They quote from Editor and Publisher:

But as The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. slowly says farewell to 151 newsroom folks who took buyouts last month, at least two longtime journalists have been reassigned to the mailroom.

Reporter Jason Jett and Assistant Deputy Photo Editor Mitchell Seidel have been filing, sorting, and delivering mail for more than a week, according to sources.

Scary.

For an idea of just how bad it is around the UK, take a look at this neat interactive timeline the Guardian has patched together:

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Posted in Blogs, Multimedia, Newspapers, Tabloids, The Future, The Web

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