Blog community doesn’t care for mag’s view of social workers

Posted by Martin Stabe on 17 September 2007 at 16:52
Tags: Blogs, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph

Community Care has had to close a comment thread on one of its blogs after a string of nasty comments on a post attacking the Daily Mail’s coverage of social work.

The post, by the RBI magazine’s deputy editor Janet Snell, promises a story in this week’s issue that will examine how, from its point of view, the Mail and the Telegraph had “hijacked” the story of an expectant mother who may have her child taken into foster care at birth. The magazine promises to put forward the social workers’ point of view.

Suffice to say that many commenters on Snell’s post do not share the her benign view of social workers.

“I had no idea that there was such a strong and virulent hatred of social workers,” says RBI’s head of blogging Adam Tinworth in an interesting post explaining the rationale of the decision to end the comments thread, a first for RBI’s B2B sites.

The silver lining, Tinworth notes, is that the discussion on the blog has become more active since the “Daily Mail incident”. His theory: the row drew more attention to the blog, and the sight of an active comment thread may have given timid readers the sense that the had “permission” to start leaving comments on the blog.

Has the Mail really ‘defied the online movement’?

Posted by Martin Stabe on 11 November 2006 at 13:39
Tags: Daily Mail

Roy Greenslade yesterday recounted Andrew Neil’s exchange at the Society of Editors conference with Donna Leigh, who asked him to account for the contradiction between the Mail titles’ success in print and their owners’ long-time indifference to the Internet.

Greenslade concludes: “The drama for the Mail - as, I suspect, Leigh was hinting at - is whether its online version will attract as large and as loyal an audience as the newsprint version.”

At the conference Neil blustered and later allegedly dismissed Leigh as “an anorak”. But the easy answer for both Neil could have been to question Leigh’s assumptions, which are a bit out of date.

While it is true that Associated was slow to bring its titles online in a serious way, it has rapidly caught up this year.

This Alexa graph, comparing the traffic of DailyMail.co.uk, Times Online, and Telegraph.co.uk, impressively illustrates the rapid rise of the Mail site in the past 12 to 18 months.

The graph shows that after years at the bottom of the pile, the Mail is suddenly getting the sort of traffic that the better-established newspaper web sites have long enjoyed. Plug in some other URLs, and Alexa that the Mail this year passed the Indy and the Sun Online.

Alexa statistics are, of course, notoriously dubious. They are based on a self-selecting sample of people who install a toolbar that monitors their internet use, which biases it towards a tech-savvy audience. But they are at least a decent approximation in general trends in websites’ relative traffic.

ABCe-audited figures are based on internal server logs and therefore are the best measure of web traffic. In the latest available figures, for March of this year, DailyMail.co.uk had 2.4m unique users and just under 17.5m page impressions. A year earlier, in March 2005, ABCe shows DailyMail.co.uk with 969,180 uniques.

Since then, Alexa shows increased growth for DailyMail.co.uk, and an AN Digital source has claimed 6.6m users in September, citing Hitwise data.
The extended caveat: In March, ABCe shows Telegraph.co.uk had 5.9m uniques and 48.7m impressions. Since then, Alexa shows Telegraph.co.uk figures slumping, but its ABCe-audited figures are actually up between March and August.

Newspaper circulation figures are out this week, showing the usual good news for forests and prompting the usual call for some sort of multimedia metric of newspaper brands’ reach.
An important step towards this ideal would be some agreement on online audience figures. It’s a shame that not all major news sites are making their ABCe figures public. That would help us gain a more accurate sense of relative online reach, and would probably allow the Mail to do some more credible boasting about its online growth.

Editorial Intelligence: ‘a disgusting idea’?

Posted by Martin Stabe on 3 April 2006 at 09:42
Tags: BBC, Daily Mail, Ethics, Journalism, Spectator, Sunday Telegraph, Sunday Times

The Sunday Times yesterday reported on a row — sorry, “catfight”, among leading media figures over whether journalists and PRs should hobnob in a forum sponsored by big organisations.Some journalists, it seems, are not impressed by Editorial Intelligence, PR guru Julia Hobsbawm’s “information and networking club” which seeks to bring together spinmeisters and leading columnists.

The Sunday Times story appears to have been provoked by a Guardian column in which Christina Odone  described EI as “PR meets journalism in Caribbean freebies, shameless backscratching and undeclared interests”. Institutionalising the “already rather dubious relationship” between hacks, flacks and the organsiations the latter represent, Odone wrote, “is just bad news.”

Odode is not alone, it seems. The Sunday Times reports that BBC has forced Barney Jones and Kirsty Lang to quit the Editorial Intelligence advisory board, after learning that they would be paid £1,000 to hold the position and £200 to attend its seminars.
Melanie Phillips has refused to get involved and saying “I don’t think that journalists and PRs should be in a jolly boat together.” Rod Liddle described the project as “a disgusting idea which suggests journalists might be up for hire.”  John Lloyd also resigned, following his appointment to head the Reuters journalism institute at Oxford — but Matthew d’Ancona is less concerned about his membership.

Editorial Intelligence sells its corporate subscribers access to an online directory of profiles of  and columnists, along with its quarterly magazine and access to networking events to bring PRs and journalists together.

Are Odone, Liddle and Phillips right — is this something journalists should not get involved with?

DMGT digital revenues soar while print ads slump

Posted by Martin Stabe on 15 March 2006 at 12:23
Tags: Associated Newspapers, Daily Mail, Evening Standard, Mail on Sunday, Metro, Northcliffe, Online, Teletext

Increased digital advertising revenue was the silver lining in a trading update released by Daily Mail and General Trust today showing slumping ad revenue at both Northcliffe and Associated Newspapers.

Over the five months to February, digital advertising revenues at DMGT’s regional newspaper group, Northcliffe, soared by 17 per cent compared with the same period last year, while advertising overall slumped by 7 per cent.

At Associated Newspapers, which includes the Daily Mail Mail on Sunday, London’s Evening Standard and Metro, there was a similar pattern. The papers’ display advertising revenues fell by 10 per cent; classified advertising revenues were down 11 per cent — but digital advertising revenue was up 43 per cent. That includes revenue from Associated New Media’s online classified advertising sites Jobsite, Find a Property and the recently-acquired Prime Location.

Bring on Craig Newmark’s tanks.

News sites’ .eu domain names

Posted by Martin Stabe on 8 March 2006 at 14:04
Tags: Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, Economist, Financial Times, Guardian, Independent, Independent on Sunday, International, News of the World, Observer, Online, Sun, Sunday Mirror, Sunday Times, Times

Kieren McCarthy — one of the blogging freelances recently mentioned in a Press Gazette feature — had a story in yesterday’s Times about the new .eu top-level domain for European web sites. The story behind the story is on his blog today.

At present, only registered trademark owners and others who can document a legal claim to a particular name can register with the European names registry EUrid. Owners of big online brands like Amazon and Skype, McCarthy reports, are fretting over whether they will be able to secure their .eu domain names before 7 April, when registration is expanded to a free-for-all “landgrab” for the general public:

… they have good reason to worry, according to EURid, the company behind the domains. “We will give the domain to the first company that applies with a valid trademark,” explained spokesman Patrik Linden.

That means even big names are not necessarily safe. Linden confirmed that Amazon had now been approved as owner of its .eu namesake, but pointed out that there was a Volvo Amazon car in the 1960s, so the car manufacturer could well have a legitimate claim.

Another car manufacturer, Volkswagen, has won a battle of the brands over Polo.eu. It beat both Ralph Lauren and Nestle to the name by a matter of minutes, according to domain name management company NetNames.

Clearly this also affects news organisations’ web sites? Are their European domain names safe?

The Telegraph has won a race for telegraph.eu. Associated Newspapers controls dailymail.eu. The Beeb has registed bbc.eu and skynews.eu is controlled by BSkyB. Also secure are itv.eu and itn.eu.

Surprisingly, perhaps, News International has grabbed thesun.eu, newsoftheworld.eu, sundaytimes.eu and thetimes.eu. But one RM Peddemors, a resident of the Netherlands, has staked claims to timeonline.eu. The same individual is also claiming economist.eu and observer.eu. Only Guardian Newspapers is appears to be challenging the claim to their trademark.

The German postal service has registered express.eu, and four companies (not including Trinity Mirror) are claiming mirror.eu.

The domain ft.eu is set to host a salmon-coloured financial news web site, but some of the other more Euro-friendly papers seem to have missed out.

Neither the Irish or British incarnations of the Indy will have independent.eu: That went to Swedish bank Independent Finans AB. Even normally web-savvy Guardian seems to have missed out: although they have secured guardianunlimited.eu, Guardian Flachglas GmbH, a glass manufacturer in Thalheim, Germany, has snapped up guardian.eu. One other domain name that a Guardian employee has recently been diligently buying up in various TLDs is still available on .eu.

Bad girl Gooding

Posted by Ian Reeves on 27 February 2006 at 15:39
Tags: Daily Mail, Magazines, Newspapers

Easy Living magazine would usually be absolutely delighted with a plug on page 3 of the Daily Mail. Probably not today, though. Its deputy features editor, Sarah Gooding, is blamed for the break-up of actress Amanda Burton’s marriage - and is pictured gazing into the eyes of the star’s estranged husband.

Mail gives away 200,000 copies in Ireland

Posted by Martin Stabe on 7 February 2006 at 10:43
Tags: Daily Mail, International

The Irish Examiner reports on yesterday’s launch of the Daily Mail’s Irish editon:

Associated Newspapers gave 200,000 copies of the first edition of the Irish Daily Mail away free yesterday and is to charge 30c for the rest of this week. It has stated that it will be “aggressively priced” which most believe to be around 75c. There are no immediate plans to sell Irish advertising in the paper and its content is aimed largely at female readers.

Associated will print 100,000 copies a day and is looking for daily sales of around 40,000.

The paper’s British edition has a circulation of 9,000 here already.

The paper also reports that an Irish ad agency predicts that competition from the newly-launched Irish Daily Mail could force Irish Independent to go entirely compact.

The Guardian says that after the initial promotion, Associated Newspapers Ireland plans to cut the print run to about 100,000 and raise the price to 75c.

Daily Mail launches Irish edition

Posted by Martin Stabe on 6 February 2006 at 15:04
Tags: Daily Mail, Nationals

The Daily Mail has launched its Irish edition.