Shropshire Star crowdsourcing fuel prices

Posted by Martin Stabe on 16 November 2007 at 12:06
Tags: Google Maps, Shropshire Star, Wordpress, crowdsourcing

The Shrophsire Star is the latest UK regional newspaper to experiment with ‘crowdsourcing’ on its web site.

Last week, the Midlands News Association title asked online readers to report the price of petrol in their area. The Star has been plotting the results on a Google Map embedded on its site.

The experiment is similar to the efforts of New York public radio’s “are you being gouged” feature, which reported on price variations in the metropolis by asking New Yorkers to report the price of milk, lettuce and beer in their area.

Another regional newspaper crowdsourcing experiment, at the Liverpool Daily Post, recently led to a front-page story about the aviation industry.

The Star’s web site, which uses WordPress as its content management system, recently gained praise from the creator of the widely-used blogging platform.

A daily newspaper site built in WordPress

Posted by Martin Stabe on 1 November 2007 at 18:18
Tags: Blogs, Drupal, Express & Star, Moveable Type, Shropshire Star, Wordpress

Britain’s largest paid-circulation regional newspaper, the Express & Star in Wolverhampton, is using the free open source blogging software WordPress as the content management system of its web site, which had 162,820 unique users in April.

Its Midlands News Association sister title, the Shropshire Star (95,612 unique users, 4/2007 ABCe) uses a similar WordPress template.

The sites, created by consultancy Design UK, went live nearly a year ago, but I never bothered to look at the sites very carefully until recently. The telltale signs are all there in the source code. Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg spotted it yesterday, and is very impressed.

The attraction of using blogging software as the basis of a newspaper site is obvious — it’s free, it allows rapid creation of new category structures based on tagging, and there is a robust commenting system built for each story. Furthermore, the Wordpress plugin system means adding on new functionality is relatively simple. The Midlands papers appear to be using a freely-available polling plug-in, for example.

For several months now, Trinity Mirror has also been using blogging software as the backend for some of its local weeklies. Moveable Type is the platform behind Buckinghamshire Advertiser and the Southport Visiter’s Southport Communities site (which was shortlisted for an AOP award this year).

The Press Gazette regional newspaper web site of the year, Gazette Live in Teesside, also uses Movable Type for its hyperlocal site, Gazette Communities (which keeps winning awards).

Lots of sites use MT or WordPress for small blog sections of their sites, I’m not aware of any other daily newspapers using basic blogging tools to run their entire sites, though.

Anyone?