Hull Daily Mail launches ‘community conversation’ site

Posted by Martin Stabe on 30 January 2008 at 08:00
Tags: Associated Northcliffe Digital, Hull Daily Mail, geotagging, hyperlocal

The Hull Daily Mail has launched an user-generated local web site that incorporates a number of social media features and could, if successful, be rolled out across Northcliffe’s regional newspapers.

The site, ThisisYourMail, combines functionality found on social bookmarking and social networking sites with mapping and geographically-localised of content.

Hull Daily Mail editor John Meehan told Press Gazette: “I wouldn’t describe it as citizen journalism or as social networking. There are elements of it but we needed another description and we have coined the phrase community conversation.”

Registered users of the site can select up to seven locations from a list of towns and other areas in the region, and can then submit text or pictures about those places. This section of the site, called YourPatch, will also be seeded with stories from the main Hull Daily Mail site, ThisisHullandEastRiding. The resulting selection of locally-relevant items will be displayed on a Google Map.

Most of the site, however, will consist exclusively of user-submitted content. In the “YourSay” open forum section on the site, users can add text or images and tag them with keywords.

Users can also form public groups with other users with similar interests (in a section called AllYours) or private groups with their that can only be accessed by invited friends or family members (YourFamily).

Throughout the sections, each submitted item has its own comment thread and a voting tool to allow users rate the quality of other users’ submissions.

Northcliffe Media content strategy director Robert Hardie said the site was the outcome of a new approach within the company to encourage local newspaper centres to innovate new digital products that could be rolled out across the group if they succeed locally

“We are more focused on empowering editors to develop ideas that, if they are successful, can be rolled out across Northcliffe,” Hardie told Press Gazette. “We can’t be afraid to fail.”

The site, which aims to attract around 12,000 monthly unique users in its first year, was built entirely by local developers and will be managed by Hull Daily Mail team, but has been designed so that it can be adapted to other sites in the future.

Because it is a completely open forum, ThisisYourMail will allow readers to raise local issues even where the paper has decided not to cover them, Hardie explained.

Often, he said, editors had found that the most commented-upon local issues in their communities were not the ones they had devoted the most coverage to.

“It represents a shift in the balance of power between the publisher and the reader,” he said.

Sport sites and SEO on digital editors’ agenda

Posted by Martin Stabe on 7 January 2008 at 15:39
Tags: Associated Northcliffe Digital, Sport, seo

The next meeting of the Digital Editors Network will be held at the University of Central Lancashire on 29 January.

The topics up for discussion at the meeting, which will feature will be the potential of sport on news media websites search engine optimisation.

Robert Hardie, managing editor of Northcliffe Digital Integrated Media, will update the group on his company’s strategy of building websites of major football and rugby clubs in Northcliffe newspapers’ regions.

More details are available on the Digital Editors Network Facebook group.

Digital highlights from Northcliffe presentation

Posted by Martin Stabe on 12 October 2007 at 10:00
Tags: Associated Northcliffe Digital, Journalism, Northcliffe

Northcliffe Media’s investor briefing to the Cityearlier this week made for some very interesting reading.

NMG managing director Michael Pelosi said: “We must deliver local audiences if we are to achieve profitable revenue growth. Digital publishing has a key role to play here.”

Meanwhile, the company also announced this week that Associated Northcliffe Digital is being reorganised to hand control over web sites back to individual newspaper titles’ editors and managing directors.

The slideshow PDF and full transcript (DOC) are on the DMGT web site. But if you don’t want to wade through all of that, we’ve done it for you:

• DMGT’s strategy is to invest in media businesses where long term growth is achievable, both in consumer and B2B sectors. In the consumer sector, Pelosi said, “we will be investing to develop their digital businesses”.
• In Britain, the company’s aim is to “meet user needs with multiple platforms”. In the long term, its “regional diversity and flexible media formats crate resilient business model”
• Online editorial control has been decentralised, Pelosi said: “All local editorial departments are now at the heart of online publishing. In the past, it was handled centrally. Breaking news online was not something which local centres could do easily. That has all changed.”
• Each Northcliffe centre is now an “Integrated Local Media Publisher” that “thinks print and on-line”. In their integrated newsrooms, there is “editorial control over on-line publishing”
• There are “no restrictions on news appearing on-line first” and “stories are broken when they are ready and not to suit print deadlines”.
• New features are coming to ThisIs sites, Pelosi said: “we are building new community areas, which should be ready later this year“.
• Traffic at thisisGloucestershire spiked heavily to a peak of more than 35,000 unique visitors per day during the July flood as it kept readers up to date with vital information, like where to find drinking water. Traffic has not subsided to pre-flood levels. The site now routinely has upwards of 10,000 unique users on weekdays.
• Intellitracker data shows unique visitors across the ThisIs sites in September 2007 were up 42 per cent year on year to around 2.5 million.
• This integrated approach also extends to sales teams, who take a “combined print and on-line approach”.
• Digital revenues are up 77 per cent year-on-year; however “ink-on-paper products … still deliver 95% of all advertising revenues”.
• Print accounts for 90 per cent of recruitment revenues, with online-only accounting for just 1 per cent, digital up-sells accounting for 7 per cent and CV matching for 2 per cent.
• Finance Director Martyn Hindley: “Advertisers are only interested only in the effectiveness of the solution to provide them with quality applications, not the split in revenue between print and digital products.”
• Northcliffe is converting free online property listings to paid-for ads, but digital revenues in the property sector are “small”.

Another area of the presentation that will interest journalists is its discussion of the Aim Higher cost reduction programme, which “delivered savings of £45m“, with the largest slice coming from £9.5m editorial cuts. Headcount was reduced from 6,809 to 5,058 in the three years to September.

Martyn Hindley, Northcliffe’s Finance Director, insisted this had not affected quality:

Editorial contributed the largest element of the savings. Again the emphasis was on process, not content. We shield away from any cost reduction activity that we believed would have impacted on quality, particularly on our local news gathering operations. Indeed, in the South West we actually bought in-house our photographic operations.

Associated buys more ad sites

Posted by Martin Stabe on 9 August 2007 at 10:27
Tags: Associated Northcliffe Digital

Associated Northcliffe Digital, the digital arm of Daily Mail & General Trust, is continuing its acquisition spree in online classified advertising sites, by snapping up JobsGroup.net, for “approximately £10 million plus a three year earn-out.

JobsGroup.net operates a stable of vertical job boards including JustEngineers.net, JustConstruction.net, and JustRail.net. AND says JobsGroup.net is on course to deliver revenue of approximately £2 million, up from £1.1 million last year.

Over the past year, AND has expanded with acquisitions in dating, price comparison and motor advertising sites.