CoverItLive – follow #cfund debate on online news business models

(And yes we know it should be ‘crowdfunding’, but that’s not the debate!)

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BBC trials News Radar project – how to see the ‘whole’ BBC news site

Interesting first project prototype from the BBC’s journalism labs – the BBC News Radar: a way to track all BBC news stories as they are published/update online.

The tagline? “Monitoring low-flying news since 1998″

As Jake MacMullin points out in a blog post introducing the radar:

“One reason you may not be aware of how frequently we publish new content is that until now there has been no one place you can go to see all of the stories we publish on the news site. You can always monitor the front page or subscribe to RSS feeds of each of the various indexes you might be interested in – but you’ll only see a small sub-set of all of the stories we publish.”

Updates to stories already published are tagged in blue and in a Twitter timeline/Tweme style the automatically updating Radar page shows how long ago the new copy was published:

An RSS feed would be nice – we’ll leave that as feedback, it’s in beta after all – but it’s a great way of seeing just how much news is being published in real-time.

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Reuters: Timeline of the Politkovskaya murder trial – three accused walk free

“The three men accused of helping murder Kremlin critic Anna Politkovskaya were found not guilty on Thursday by a Russian court,” Reuters reports.

Follow this link for a Reuters timeline of the Politkovskaya murder trial.

The Guardian reports that “a fourth defendant, Pavel Ryaguzov, a lieutenant colonel in Russia’s FSB spy agency, was acquitted in a separate but related case”.

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Mansfield Chad honours retired editor Jeremy Plews with video series

The Mansfield Chad is running a seven-week video series (eight episodes) on retired editor Jeremy Plews.

Plews, who joined the paper as a trainee, was editor for 36 years at the paper and stepped down last week. Below is the first instalment, the work of chief photographer Roger Grayson, sub-editor Peter Hemmett and digital editor Tom Pegg:

We’re reliably informed by Tom Pegg that Jeremy never took a day off sick in his 36 years…

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Obama’s digital guru (aka Thomas Gensemer) at City: “Email is still the killer app”

Obama digital campaign ‘guru,’ Thomas Gensemer, has attracted a fair bit of attention with his arrival in London – check out the Guardian G2 feature and this article at TimesOnline, for example. A Guardian video can be watched here at this link.

Gensemer, whose company Blue State Digital built the Obama website and managed the online campaign, was also speaking at City University on Tuesday evening: at an event entitled ‘Obama’s (not so) Secret Weapon: the role of the internet in the 2008 US Presidential Election’.

His talk officially launched the journalism school’s new MA in Political Campaigning and Reporting. A video of the event can be watched here.

Etan Smallman was at the event, and shares his report with us here:

Plain old-fashioned email is the key tool for successful political campaigning in the digital age, the mastermind behind the Obama digital campaign, Thomas Gensemer, told an audience at City University this week.

Thomas Gensemer, managing partner of Blue State Digital, who built the highly acclaimed online operation, dismissed the impact of social networking in favour of ‘the simplicity of email’.

The message is ‘use tools, not gimmicks’, Gensemer said. “For all the talk of social networking, blogs, and mobile applications, email is still the ‘killer app’. Our email list of 13.5 million individual email subscribers was the backbone of the campaign,” he added.

“This is not a story about technology; this is not a story about Facebook or Twitter. This is about dynamic, personalised, two-way relationship via email,” he said. Gensemer said that more than a billion emails were sent out to over 13.5 million email subscribers throughout Obama’s presidential campaign. It resulted in my.barackobama.com raising half a billion dollars in donations.

The mainstream media is ‘still included in the cycle’, Gensemer said. “It is often that you’re bypassing them to get to the audience, and then encouraging the media to tell the story to the audience. You’re inverting the relationship a little bit. They don’t serve as the filter any more – when you have the engaged constituency online, you go directly to them.”

Gensemer, who previously worked in the UK on Ken Livingstone’s unsuccessful London mayoral campaign, is currently expanding his operation to the UK political arena by opening an office in London.

Some organisations still believe their audience isn’t online, he said. “It’s no longer the case in the ‘first world’. Even people over 70 – the ‘silver surfers’ – they’re out there. They’re willing to do something for you. They just need to be asked. This isn’t just about college kids. This isn’t just about bloggers in Westminster.”

“It is not about magical technology,’ he said, arguing that the key components to successful online campaigning are transparency and authenticity: “You can’t fake it,” he added.

“Do you really believe that the average MP is Twittering?” he asked. “Do you believe that Barack Obama Twitters? I’ll tell you, he doesn’t.”

New social media crazes like Twitter ‘tend to distract,’ Gensemer said.

“It tends to be from shiny object, to shiny object, to shiny object. For organisations that need to invest in deep personal relationships with a variety of people, just doing that sort of scattergun approach is dizzying.

“It burns through political capital pretty quickly because it doesn’t really talk to the people it’s trying to talk to,” he said.

“The lesson of the Obama campaign is to use tools to facilitate a message – don’t use gimmicks. None of this would have happened [just] because somebody was Twittering.”

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Matthew Buckland: Sophisticated ways make your articles go viral

Online media sites are being left behind by new ‘more agile, aggressive and more sophisticated development’ in sharing content with social media, says Buckland.

Full post at this link…

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ItsDevelopmental: Why the NUJ should focus on digital training

The National Union for Journalists (NUJ) needs to focus on upskilling members for digital publishing, writes Martin Couzins.

“This is a period of immense change and those of us who work in the media need to keep abreast of this change. And organisations that represent those that work in the media must keep pushing the training agenda. These are collaborative times, so let’s collaborate.”

(Check out the response)

Full post at this link…

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Hitwise: How the Sun capitalised on the Alfie Patten story

The Sun’s online coverage of ‘baby father’ Alfie Patten broke traffic records for the site. Hitwise’s Robin Goad analyses how search and social media played a part in this.

Full post at this link…

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SND.org: World’s Best Design Awards for five papers

“In its 30th annual ‘The Best of Newspaper Design™ Creative Competition,’ the Society for News Design has named four newspapers from Europe and one from Mexico as ‘World’s Best-Designed Newspapers,™” the organisation’s website reports.

This year’s SND30 five top ‘World’s Best-Designed Newspapers™’ are:

• Akzia, Moscow, Russia, biweekly, circulation 200,000
• Eleftheros Tipos, Athens, Greece, daily, circulation, 86,000
• Expresso, Paço de Arcos, Portugal, weekly, circulation 120,000
• The News, Mexico City, daily, circulation 10,000
• Welt am Sonntag, Berlin, weekly, 400,000

Full story at this link…

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MediaShift: Five challenges for small college media in US

Bryan Murley takes a look at five challenges for US college media. He outlines:

1. Small staffs and high churn rate; 2. Instructors who don’t get it; 3. Old mindsets from the students; 4. Not enough payoff for students; 5. Sparse resources.

Full story at this link…

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