Snowblog: Jon Snow’s review of the televised leaders’ debate

Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow reviews last night’s televised debate between the leaders of the UK’s three main political parties:

The American tuition was evident. Clegg’s engagement with the camera was by far the best – I do not know whose input that might have been – possibly his own. But it was a wise use of the medium.

The most notable American influence in the debate was the wheeling out of individual and anecdotal stories. They didn’t work- they were thin and largely inconclusive, sometimes begging the question as to whether they were true. They don’t seem to work in a UK context.

Elsewhere, Shane Richmond blogs a round-up of some of the best one-liners making up the conversation around the debates on Twitter.

Last night’s broadcaster ITV and plenty of other news sites were busy liveblogging the debates and providing instant polling of viewers, but what were the best ways to follow online (and what tools didn’t work out)? Let us know in the comments below.

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Media Release: Birmingham Post launches sister title Birmingham Post Lite

As reported by The Business Desk West Midlands earlier this week, Trinity Mirror is launching a new freesheet as a sister paper to the paid-for Birmingham Post, which changed from a daily to weekly publication last year.

Birmingham Post Lite will be delivered to around 18,000 homes in the south Birmingham areas of Harborne and Moseley and will contain a selection of the Birmingham Post’s editorial content and material from its Post Property magazine, says a release.

The new newspaper will not carry the paid-for Post’s specialised business
and financial news. Instead it will combine south Birmingham news with the features and leisure content from the Post’s award-winning team.

The BusinessDesk (TBD) had the date pegged as April 22, but suggests the launch is a direct response to plans for a new rival title, the Birmingham Press, from newspaper entrepreneur Chris Bullivant.

“The title (…) is intended to go head-to-head with the Press in the battle to secure advertising from the city’s mid-market estate agents,” says TBD’s report.

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A New York Times link shared every four seconds on Twitter

That’s according to a post from Jacob Harris on Open, NYTimes.com’s developers’ blog. Harris explains the process behind counting the number of links shared – including how shortened URLs are dealt with – when taking a few hours’ worth of tweets from a Monday afternoon.

The data ranged from a minimum of 4 to a maximum of 57 (that is, from once every 15 seconds to almost once a second), as the following chart of minute-by-minute counts demonstrates.

Full post at this link…

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AllThingsD: Replace ‘real-time’ with ‘right-time’ for the web

Right-time – a new buzzword for information and news on the web, suggests AllThingsD. The term was coined by a speaker at Twitter’s Chirp Conference earlier this week, David Pakman:

The ‘right-time’ Web is more valuable in some cases than the real-time web. Real-time data is only interesting when I’m actually looking for that information. There’s no service today that’s giving information when it’s really needed. If your company is doing that…I brought my chequebook

Full story at this link…

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#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – organise your Twitter links

Newsgathering: feedtrace lets you filter what links you receive via Twitter by preferred URLs or categories and presents the results in a handy browser sidebar. Tipster: Laura Oliver.

To submit a tip to Journalism.co.uk, use this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

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New York Times/ProPublica’s DocumentCloud makes newspaper debut

DocumentCloud, a technology aimed at making data more accessible and helping journalists and news organisations deal with large volumes of documents, has made its debut on the Chicago Tribune’s website.

The Tribune has used DocumentCloud to publish the source documents of a news story and allow readers to browse by section and receive additional information around highlighted annotations.

The Tribune is one of 21 more than 70 news partners beta testing the technology, which is funded by a grant from the Knight News Challenge in 2009. The New York Times and ProPublica have allowed several staff to “moonlight” on the project, but is an independent organisation led by Eric Umansky, senior editor at ProPublica, Scott Klein, news applications editor at ProPublica, and Aron Pilhofer, the New York Times newsroom’s interactive technologies editor

Update: Despite this tweet from Aron Pilhofer, I am reliably informed by Amanda Hickman, programme director of DocumentCloud, in the comment below that the technology has also appeared alongside Newshour and Propublica stories too.

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Nieman Journalism Lab: MinnPost editor on new audience building strategy

Valuing returning readers over vagrant visitors, a strategy extolled by Gawker a few weeks back and termed “reader affection”, has caught on at non-profit investigative site MinnPost. Speaking at the ASNE NewsNow Ideas Summit this week, editor Joel Kramer announced that MinnPost is also a fan of the affection metric, and aims to build up a “community of intensely engaged followers”. From Nieman:

The strategy, for MinnPost, is a financial as much as an editorial one: It’s about concentrating impact, but also about monetising that impact. The outlet’s ultimate goal in developing a core readership, Kramer said, is to “convert that community into enough money to sustain the journalism”.

Full story at this link…

Read Journalism.co.uk’s interview with Kramer at this link.

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Cameron’s fear that TV debates might be ‘slow and sluggish’ (video)

Conservative leader David Cameron has expressed concern that the televised leader debates, the first of which will be aired on ITV at 8.30pm tonight, could be “slow and sluggish”. He’s worried, he told ITN News, that the public might feel “short-changed.”

We’ll see. But if he prefers fast-paced and high pressure television, why has he refused to appear on a Panorama Special – an election tradition – with Jeremy Paxman?

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NUJ Scotland launches campaign against ‘amateur’ sport journalists

Via AllMediaScotland we learn that NUJ Scotland is launching a campaign against the non-professional sports reporters the organisation considers a “creeping menace”.

According to the NUJ Scotland Campaigns site, the campaign – ‘Kick the amateurs into touch!’ – will “target sports desks who regularly hire teachers, policemen and other non-journalists to report on sports events across Scotland”.

It continues:

When freelances are losing work because of cut-backs and staff journalists are being made redundant it is a scandal that sports editors are using their own version of “fans with lap-tops” without the journalistic skills and traditions that help maintain standards and ethics in the industry.

The union is writing to sports editors, the SPL and Scottish League for support as well as the Sports Ministers in Holyrood and Westminster to help us reclaim ground for the professional writers and photographers.

Regular freelances who are still fortunate to hang onto their work are fed up sitting beside this gang of “citizen journalists” who are queering our pitch. They are concerned at falling standards and rates of shift payments driven down by cheap labour.

But the first respondents on the AMS site are sceptical. One commenter remarks:

“What matters is the quality of the report. If an enthusiastic amateur is better than an NUJ hack then tough. As usual protectionism is the way an industry goes down. The newspaper trade is on a downward slope look at the figures. The internet is going to wipe newspapers out, even TV is being hit. It is called change and progress. The costs of the internet are much less than newspapers. When new technology appears things change and there is nothing the NUJ can do about it.

(Hat-tip: Jon Slattery)

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International survey of newspapers’ business strategy calls for executives

Newspaper executives are being asked to complete a survey to provide a better understanding of how newspapers are reacting and changing their businesses to respond to ongoing changes to traditional news operations.

This is the second such survey carried out by The World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA), the UK’s University of Central Lancashire and the Norwegian School of Management. The short World Newspaper Future & Change Study 2010 should take no more than 15 minutes to complete and will address how newspapers are adapting their businesses for digital and in response to ongoing international and localised financial pressures.

Last year, despite extremely challenging financial circumstances for many newspapers around the world during the financial downturn, the majority of the 657 respondents indicated that their companies were in innovation mode, creating new print and digital products and new businesses, such as insourced printing, training and events.

Respondents’ identities will remain confidential.

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