Matthew Ingram examines the problems of paid-for aggregation for the Nieman Journalism Lab, using All Things Digital as a specific example.
“Curation has become a popular term in media circles, in the sense of a human editor who filters and selects content, and then packages it and delivers it to readers in some way. Many people (including me) believe that, in an era when information sources are exploding online, aggregation and curation of some kind is about the only service left that people might be willing to pay for.”
“Enough already. Partial facts and misinformation about newspapers are distorting the view for everyone, including readers and advertisers,” writes Donna Barrett over at Editor&Publisher.
“(…)The crisis facing newspapers is not an audience problem. It is a revenue problem.”
Problem-solving: A handy website for posing those hard to answer questions is AllExperts. Volunteers under categories including business, gadgets and technology can offer advice and solutions to your woes. Tipster: Laura Oliver.
The site was not among the US’ top 30 newspaper websites last month, according to data from Nielsen Online and posted a 23 per cent year-on-year drop in unique users.
It’s local counterpart and former online collaborator before it went online-only, the Seattle times, posted a 70 per cent year-on-year gain in unique users last month to its own website – recording 2.2 million.
However, according to a spokesman for the Seattle PI’s owners, in an article on the Puget Sound Business Journal, the Nielsen data is flawed and internal data suggets the site actually showed a 10 per cent growth in year-on-year traffic last month.
Attracting international, ex-pat attention and fans reliving the moment online, sport has shown its ability to drive web traffic to news sites once again with a surge in the Express & Star’s web visitors following the promotion of local football club Wolverhampton Wanderers to the UK’s Premiership.
The site achieved a record 600,000 page views yesterday, with around 330,000 views on the Wolves picture galleries.
“The website chronicles a great day for Wolves fans and we are amazed by the huge interest in it,” said internet editor, Tim Walters, in a statement on the site.
“The traffic on the website was enormous yesterday and today the levels of interest are being maintained.
“The mood of Wolverhampton is dictated by the success or failure of Wolves.
“There is a real feel-good feeling in the city at the moment and people really can’t get enough.”
The paper apologised to the ANC party leader for a piece published on March 6, which suggested he was guilty of rape. The correction was run yesterday – a day before polling opened in South Africa.
Following its original publication Zuma demanded an apology and damages from the paper.
The reference was the result of an editing error, the paper maintains – Zuma was acquitted of rape charges in 2006, it said in its apology.
…or, more appropriately, watch how the paper is responding to its readers on Twitter.
An aggregation page for twitterers working for parent company Spokane Media Cowles Co has been set up, so readers can see conversations from the news org’s staff, local TV stations and followers all in one place.
“Members of the MySpace uReport community can become ‘uReporters’ by uploading video and photos tagged by specific news categories, including USA, World, Entertainment and Politics. This content could be featured in relevant programming on FOX News Channel and foxnews.com, with FOX News maintaining editorial control of the MySpace page.”
Today’s budget announcement is being billed as the most significant of recent times given the UK’s current financial woes.
This is both a breaking news story, but one that requires closer analysis and follow up – and, perhaps most importantly, the ability to make it relevant to the reader.
So how are news organisations covering it online and who’s ticking these boxes?
In addition there’s a nice ‘What to expect’ guide breaking down the issues that are likely to feature in the budget announcement.
FT.com
Arguably the go-to site for budget coverage given its specialism, the FT is building on tried and trusted features from last year (a budget day podcast, video analysis, a budget calculator) with a new liveblog from 12pm covering Alistair Darling’s speech, editor Robert Shrimsley, who will participate, told Journalism.co.uk.
The format is based on the site’s MarketsLive feature successfully developed and used by its Alphaville blog. As such it will ‘bring people people up to speed, but inform them in an entertaining way’. Financial analysis but entertaining – two styles that rarely meet, said Shrimsley, but that will be key to FT.com’s liveblogging of the budget.
“There’s a premium on getting that information out and telling people what its means. We feel at the FT that we have the right people to pass on that analysis,” explained Shrimsley.
There will be a Twitter feed too, but it’s crucial not spam people with updates, he added. Readers are encouraged to participate in both this stream and the liveblog though.
Alphaville isn’t being used as a lab for experimenting with new ways of coverage, he stressed, but there is potential for more liveblogging across the site. It’s important not to overdose on technology, however, but to use only when applicable, he added.
“Can we offer our audience what is worth reading? There’s lots of innovation on the internet and there’s lots that you can do – that doesn’t mean you have to,” he said.
Channel 4 News website
More use of Twitter by the Channel 4 news team – as introduced by presenter Krishnan Guru-Murphy in the vid below:
Liveblogging at regional level
Deciphering what the budget means for the average news reader is being tackled head on by the Newcastle Evening Chronicle with a liveblog taking place across a number of Trinity Mirror centres.
“We’ll be mainly trying to digest it for *normal* people with rx [reactions] from experts, rather than the scary £180bn debt figures,” said Colin George, multimedia editor, in a Twitter update.
Staff at the newly integrated Herald titles will see a website merger take place in the next few weeks. The Sunday Herald and Herald websites will come together to create www.heraldscotland.com. Similar plans were mooted as far back as October 2007 and major changes have taken place in the newspapers’ newsroom since Donald Martin took on a new editor-in-chief role.
