Newcastle Journal blog ‘slams’ hacks’ lingo

Posted by Martin Stabe on 9 January 2008 at 10:46
Tags: Blogs, The Journal

A blog by Graeme Whitfield, assistant news editor of the Newcastle Journal, is collecting examples of poor writing by journalists for a “dictionary of journalese”, Holdthefrontpage.co.uk notes.

So far he has taken on words used almost exclusively by journalists, such as ’slam’ and ‘tot’.

(Hopefully JournalLive will fix the incorrect links to its blogs’ RSS feeds soon, so that readers can follow Whitfield’s blog regularly!)

4 comments

@Society of Editors - Football economics coming to online journalism salaries?

Posted by Martin Stabe on 6 November 2007 at 11:14
Tags: Guardian Media Group, Mail on Sunday, Sky, Sky News, Sky.com, Society of Editors, Society of Editors, Telegraph Media Group, Telegraph.co.uk, Times Online, telegraph

The final session of the conference is “The Future is ours: 2020 Vision”, which is billed as “lifting the covers on editors’ crystal balls”.

Appropriately, the panel will be chaired by Martin Stanford, presenter of Sky.com News, the rolling news channel’s interactive programme which covers the most popular stories and debates on the web. He reveals the the Madeleine McCann story has constantly lead Sky news traffic, regardless of what else is going on. Meanwhile, the revelation that the home secretary smoked cannabis, which was a massive story everywhere else, “scored an absolute zero”.

Anne Spackman, editor-in-chief of Times Online, says the paper has been digitising its archive, which will add 20 million items to its website, which already has 750,000 “bits of content” at any one time. It is noticable how litttle the publication has changed over the first 200 years, she says, but the pace of change has increased dramatically.

Her most startling prediction for the future is the rise of football economics in journalism. Spackman describes a “Drogba effect” where pay in journalism will be greatly skewed towards stars who are able to bring in a lot of traffic online.

Spackman repeats her comments from last week about the type of journalists she is seeking to recruit for Times Online: “The people who are by far the most valuable are those who combine journalism skills with real technical skill.”

Her prediction for 2020 reflects her view that many people with these attributes are currently men: “I think this will be an industry rather more full of men than it is now.”

Mark Dodson, chief executive of GMG Regional Media, which includes the host Manchester Evening News, says things have changed dramatically in this sector. Cover prices were static for years, and companies relentlessly measured themselves against the semi-annual ABC figures. That has all changed recently, with the introduction of part-free distribution and new online products.

“Video will be a key aspect of every web site we produce,” Dodson says.

Will Lewis, editor-in-chief of the Telegraph Group, outlines the trends he expects in the next few years:

1. Localisation - Good news for the regional press, because there will be greater focus on customising news by location.
2. Personalisation - Mobile and other personal gateways will become the preferred medium tailored to the individuals
3. Enablers - Rather than handing down pearls of wisdom, and will provide practical help and user-generated
4. Double media - Video and text will not be enough. They want to read as the watch.
5. Customer obsessiveness - It is no longer a secret what our readers actually want. We will sell more papers where people now shop. “Our customers will be as much outside the UK as within it,” he concludes.

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.

New blog seeks answers to newspapers’ web questions

Posted by Martin Stabe on 23 March 2007 at 11:17
Tags: Blogs, CN Group, News & Star, Online, Regionals, University of Central Lancashire, metrics

Nick Turner, the head of digital content at the Carlisle-based CN Group, has responding to a Press Gazette story about regional newspapers’ growing online readership, with a letter announcing a new blog for newspapers’ web editors:

You might like to add the News & Star to your list with its 151,082 unique users in January.

However, while it’s nice to report such a figure for a site without a Premiership football team to help boost its traffic you are right to caution against comparisons. Anyone trying to work out a system of common measurement will soon find their head spinning. The News & Star’s figures have actually dropped 16% year on year, for example, but this is because picture sales, property and other services have been moved to different sites.

However, it’s good to see a willingness to exchange information as we all try to reach an understanding of how our titles are most likely to flourish in the digital age. To this end I have working with the Journalism Department at the University of Central Lancashire to establish the Digital Editors’ Network (RSS) to support journalists working on media websites.

On the blog itself, Turner explains its aims:

… the Digital Editors’ Network is about helping those of us who are responsible for making it happen. We might be able to work out together the best ways to tackle issues such as search engine optimisation, maximising the potential of videos, developing ad revenues and increasing user generated content.

In many cases this can be achieved with a phone call or email to ask: Have you tried this? Or how does that feature on your website work?

Hopefully, we can do this in a way that is not constrained by the competition between rival media.

This is certainly a blog to add to your RSS reader.

Civil war on Trinity editors’ blogs

Posted by Martin Stabe on 19 March 2007 at 16:35
Tags: Croydon Advertiser, Harrow Observer, Harrow Times, Newsquest, Reading Chronicle, Trinity Mirror, Uxbridge Gazette

Normally it’s newspaper editors who worry about the trolls who lower the tone in the comments sections of their blogs. At Trinity Mirror’s newspapers in southern England, however, something unusual is happening: the editors are too busy trolling each others’ sites to worry about insults from outsiders.

Trinity Mirror Southern’s editors have all been blogging for a few months now, but recently seem to have specialised in posting their Schadenfreude over their stablemates’ travails.

Adrian Seal of the Uxbridge Gazette, for example, blogged his amusement over by a post by Simon Jones of the Reading Chronicle, who has lost a recent recruit from Down Under just months after “making a great song and dance” about how the Australian reporter had allegedly chosen to join paper rather than the award-winning Croydon Advertiser.

The Advertiser’s editor, Ian Carter, is also amused by this turn of events and describes Jones’ claims that the antipodean hack had picked the Chronicle over his own paper as “a gross distortion of the truth”.

Carter also notes that Lindsay Coulson of the Harrow Observer “is gleefully ignoring the unwritten rule that exists between most local papers by routinely rubbishing her rival’s front pages and sticking the boot into all and sundry”. On her own blog in Harrow, Coulson replies to her critics’s criticism of her criticism of the (thankfully, Newsquest-owned) Harrow Times.

But don’t think the readers aren’t taking part in all this heckling. When Seal (we’re back in Uxbridge, now) expressed his satisfaction with “another strong edition” of the Gazette, someone called A. Reader jumped right in:

“another strong edition” - such modesty! Perhaps you should leave it to your readers to be the judge of that. The thing I find irritating about the Gazette is the obvious details that seem to get missed out - e.g. the story on your site just now about the car dealer who assaulted a 74 year old. What was his sentence? It’s basic who, when. why, what, where stuff! And let’s not get started on all the typos (in headlines even) week in and week out!

And which paper do you edit, anonymous “reader”?

1 comment

Additional links for Thursday

Posted by Martin Stabe on 12 October 2006 at 16:02
Tags: Digg, Guardian, Guardian Media Group, Journalism

• Read/Write Web: The Social News Faceoff
  A head-to-head comparison between social news aggregation sites Digg, Reddit, Newsvine, and Netscape. Digg is judged the winner, although it has not made the promised strides from being tech-centric to appealing to a more generalist audience.
• AOP: Conference keynote videos available
  Watch last week’s speeches by Carolyn McCall and Tim O’Reilly.
• CJR Daily: London Times Prints ‘Rumour’, Market Goes Gaga
  Times rumour of the day lifts brewery shares 2 per cent.
• Newsknife: Top 100 US newspaper sites on Google News
  Contains what it says on the tin.

P&J owns TheAberdeenPaper.com

Posted by Martin Stabe on 5 October 2006 at 15:09
Tags: Aberdeen Press & Journal, Journalism, thelondonpaper

If News International ever use the domain names they have purchased to launch freesheets in cities across Britain, they may have to come up with a new name in the north of Scotland.

TheAberdeenPaper.com is already registered, but not by News International. Aberdeen Journals, the DC Thomson division that publishes the Aberdeen Press & Journal, got there first, registering the domain on 14 September, ten days after thelondonpaper launched.

News International registered thelondonpaper.com back in February and the other city domain names on 31 March.

User-generated content in new London Lite

Posted by Martin Stabe on 25 August 2006 at 16:11
Tags: Associated Newspapers, Evening Standard, Journalism, London Lite

Associated Newspapers drew first blood in the London free newspaper war with News International today by rushing out an early version of its new free daily paper, London Lite.

Here’s the front page:

And here’s page 3, leading with a story about Peaches Geldorf:

One interesting feature of London Lite is its intention to be “an interactive paper for the internet age”. Readers will be encouraged to contribute to the paper via the existing Evening Standard website at thisislondon.co.uk/chat.

The messages e-mailed or submitted to the site will be printed in a user-generated content section of the new London freesheet is called This is London’s Messageboard:

4 comments

Web-only readers expand US regionals’ reach

Posted by Martin Stabe on 25 August 2006 at 11:32
Tags: Journalism, Newspapers, Regionals, United States

Web-only readers account for between two and 15 per cent of readers in the top 25 US regional newspaper markets and are helping papers expand their reach to sought-after upmarket audiences, according to a new study by Scarborough research (PDF).

The study, reported by PaidContent.org, suggests US regional papers have been able to use their websites to attract new audiences, particularly among the young and affluent who have been assumed not be be reading newspaper content.

Scarborough concludes that its study shows that “newspaper websites have undergone an important transition in the minds of media executives as well as readers. They are no longer a footnote in the story of a newspaper’s success; they have become a headline.”

Watching Newsquest

Posted by Martin Stabe on 12 June 2006 at 14:34
Tags: Journalism, Newsquest

Newsquest Watch, a new blog dedicated (obviously) to monitoring the goings-on at the Gannett-owned regional newspaper group, has been launched.

In a welcome message, the blogger, one Stevie D, writes:

I am a concerned individual based in the UK with considerable knowledge of this firm, which is part of Gannett. I believe that any business which plays such a vital role in communities up and down the country should be accountable. We’ll highlight the profits they make, their employment practices and the way they have cut back on local newsgathering in the name of greed.

Stevie D? Surely this concerned individual is the disgrunted journalist from Blackpool who was writing about his “local Newsquest fiefdom” under the same moniker a few months ago?

Well worth watching.