Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog » Liverpool

MirrorFootball.co.uk: Bringing Liverpool fans a better result

Laura Oliver — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:27:42 +0000

Hats off to football site Off The Post for this excellent spot – which has now correctly attributed the spot to Keith Belfast’s blog.

It seems the Mirror’s new football website, launched last month, gave an alternative match report for last night’s game between Liverpool and Aston Villa.

The site’s Twitter account @mirrorfootball tweeted the final score as 1-0 Liverpool. In reality the side suffered their second defeat of the season and it finished 3-1 to Aston Villa (as correctly reported elsewhere on the site):

Automation problem or just a dreaming Liverpool fan behind the account? Perhaps it’s fantasy football goes Twitter? Journalism.co.uk has contacted the team and is hoping to find out. As of 4:18pm today the tweet was still there…

Similar Posts:

Headlines and Deadlines: Journalist tweets being shot or why Twitter works

Laura Oliver — Mon, 11 May 2009 18:03:09 +0000

Alison Gow gives the back story on deputy business editor of the Liverpool Post and Echo, Tony McDonough, who was caught in the crossfire at a Liverpool pub last weekend.

McDonough tweeted after it had happened and during his hospital visit.

Why?

“People are hardwired to want to share stories; at times of crisis we all want to tell someone (…) Journalists want to get news out too, and they want to get it out fast and first to as wide an audience as possible,” writes Gow.

Full post at this link…

Similar Posts:

Redundancy round-up: 50 jobs to go at the Telegraph and 78 at Trinity Mirror

Judith Townend — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 18:56:17 +0000

A day that saw plenty of job cut announcements. Here’s the roundup for this evening and Journalism.co.uk will update tomorrow.

Trinity Mirror: 78 jobs to go as reported at Press Gazette and Hold the Front Page. Press Gazette reported that a restructure will see journalists divided into four centralised multimedia divisions:

“The publisher has today entered into a consultation period with staff and said it envisaged 59 editorial jobs would be cut. It said it was committed to voluntary redundancies where possible.

“The bulk of the job losses will come in Liverpool, where the 175-strong editorial team will be cut to 132 and the Liverpool Daily Post will scrap its Saturday edition.”

The Telegraph: 50 jobs editorial jobs cut: Fifty editorial staff are to lose their jobs at Telegraph Media Group, management told staff today.

“It is understood the cuts represent a 13-14 per cent saving to the editorial budget and will be brought into effect by Christmas at the latest,” reports MediaGuardian.

Similar Posts:

Looking at the Liverpool papers live blog coverage of the Rhys Jones murder trial

Judith Townend — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 11:13:28 +0000

The Liverpool regional papers, the Liverpool Daily Post and Echo, continue their comprehensive coverage of the Rhys Jones murder trial using Cover It Live technology, which allows the reporter to feed back detailed information about what is happening in the courtroom.

The liveblog of the Rhys Jones trial is currently on standby, but should be going again at 14.30 today. The Rhys Jones coverage can also be viewed together on one page.

For ease of reading back through, it would be good to have the live court coverage more clearly marked with dates and days of trial in the left hand margin next to the times.

On October 9 the Liverpool Daily Post’s editor, Mark Thomas, asked for feedback, but it seems none has been offered.

It’s an impressive feat, which has been going since October 9, and brings up questions of modern day court reporting: it will be interesting to see if it enters the public panel discussion at this week’s POLIS debate at LSE. They’re debating ‘Respect for Contempt: Keeping Speech Free and Trials Fair’.

With a panel that includes Maxine Mawhinney from BBC News 24 as chair, and contributions from Joshua Rozenburg (Legal Affairs Editor, Daily Telegraph), Jonathan Kotler (US Attorney and USC Annenburg School of Journalism), Mark Haslam (partner, BCL Burton Copeland, and Nick Davies (Guardian, author of Flat Earth News), it should make for an interesting set of much-needed discussions.

Similar Posts:

Geotagged journalism: behind Trinity Mirror’s news maps

Laura Oliver — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 16:30:46 +0000

At last week’s Digital Editors’ Network event in Preston, Trinity Mirror’s new geotagged news maps were a popular topic of conversation.

Launched on the Liverpool Echo and Liverpool Daily Post (LDP) websites, the maps let readers search for news by postcode.

But what information are journalists required to input to make the maps work? and how does this affect their newsgathering?

Alison Gow, deputy editor of the LDP, explained the system to Journalism.co.uk:

“At the moment, every time our reporters create a news story they fill in certain fields which dictate where a story is placed online (e.g. story type, keyword tags, author).

“For stories to appear on the map the reporter simply ensures the new ‘postcode’ field is also completed; they do this by chosing from a vast selection of regional postcodes which are already included in a dropdown menu.”

For stories that could be tagged with multiple postcodes, the primary site of the news, e.g. the accident site in a road crash, is currently being used, though multiple location tagging is being looked into.

“We don’t use them for everything; there would be no point in geotagging Liverpool town hall for every council story, for example. But for location-specific articles they work really well.

“As it grows the map offers greater potential for ‘news from your street’ for readers, and it makes the Post and Echo sites more sticky – people can see markers for stories in their area and this should encourage them to click through and read more,” said Gow.

To develop the project further, the same map format is being looked at for other editorial content, such as business articles, she added.

Any more questions about the journalists involvement with these maps? Leave a comment and hopefully we can get a response.

Similar Posts:

Evening Leader plots UFO sightings with Dipity

Laura Oliver — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 16:44:57 +0000

Nice use of timeline builder Dipity by the Evening Leader: the paper has plotted videos and text reports of UFO sitings in the area onto a timeline, turned it into a widget and embedded it on its website.

What’s extra nice is that the Dipity widget lets readers look at the info as a timeline, map, flipbook or list. Using the third-party service helps the newspaper get extra mileage out of what are no doubt already popular online stories.

The feature has also been made ‘public’ through dipity’s site to help drive traffic back to the Evening Leader.

The tool has previously been used by the Manchester Evening News for its coverage of a proposed congestion charge for the city; and the Liverpool Daily Post to create a 24-hour snapshot of Liverpool as this year’s European Capital of Culture.

Similar Posts:

More from Dipity: Manchester Evening News plots congestion charge coverage

Laura Oliver — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:29:48 +0000

The Manchester Evening News has used free online tool Dipity to create an interactive timeline of the paper’s coverage of a proposed congestion charge for Greater Manchester.

The timeline features text and images from key dates in the ongoing story, dating back to January 10 2005.

The information can also be displayed and browsed by text-only, images-only or on a map.

The Liverpool Daily Post recently used the same online tool to create an interactive timeline for its diary of a day in Liverpool.

Similar Posts:

Liverpool Daily Post runs online diary to mark capital of culture status

Laura Oliver — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 13:11:26 +0000

The Liverpool Daily Post is running an online diary today to mark Liverpool’s status as the 2008 European Capital of Culture.

Using online service Dipity, the Post has created an interactive timeline with contributions from readers and its editorial team to capture ‘a day in the life of Liverpool’.

The pictures and text submitted can be plotted and viewed on an interactive timeline or Google map, or browsed by text and images.

Similar Posts:

How news flows though the partially integrated newsroom of Liverpool Post and Echo papers

Oliver Luft — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 15:23:56 +0000

The Hub and Spoke laying out may be in vogue for the majority of those adapting to an integrated newsroom but you’d be hard pressed to call Trinity Mirror’s Liverpool nerve centre anything other than an archipelago.

Alison Gow, deputy editor of Liverpool Daily Post, gave Journalism.co.uk a quick tour and explained how a partially rather than fully integrated newsroom for Liverpool’s Daily Post and Echo newspapers and a portfolio of weeklies served them best.

Similar to other large cities in the UK, Liverpool’s morning paper, the Liverpool Daily Post (typically 15,000 copies circulated per day) and the evening Echo (109,000) serve vastly different markets. To account for this the newsroom has integrated but also demarked areas where each paper’s interest is best served by not mixing processes.

The newsdesks of the Post & Echo had previously been fully integrated but the unsuccessful experiment lasted only 18 months and end in 2001, as it didn’t fully serve the needs each paper had and met with opposition from staff who were resistant to working on the other title.

“I suspect the industry is a lot more broad-minded now as we work across print, internet, TV and radio,” Gow told Journalism.co.uk.

COPY

The dailies and weekly newspapers have adapted and refined a partially integrated newsroom where the two main papers share news copy, but keep diary and features separate.

“A government minister in town would tend to be interviewed by a Post reporter,” Gow told Journalism.co.uk. “That copy would be sent by the Post newsdesk to the Echo newsdesk to be rewritten and subbed down. Echo page leads are around 350, Post 600 plus.

“The Post & Echo share a court reporter but the very distinct target audiences of both papers means what makes a splash in the Echo, gangster trials for example, may struggle to make a page lead in the Post.

“Inquests would be covered by one reporter whose copy would be shared between both papers.

“An exception would be Liverpool council meetings – mostly covered by the council reporters from both papers as it’s a contact-building exercise as much as anything.”

The Echo can also publish stories from the weeklies the day the papers are published, Gow added, as the assistant news editor has access to their content queues.

“It’s a co-operative system and involves the newsdesks, picturedesk and multimedia desks talking to each other. That’s why the command desk is so important,” added Gow.

STAFF

At the centre of the archipelago – the big island – is the command desk where Post and Echo news editors and their deputies sit along with a picture editor who works across both publications and the Echo design editor.

Reporters are title specific, as are the features and sports teams, and both papers have separate features and sports editors and deputy editors, Arts editors and motoring editors.

A multimedia head, working across both titles, also sits on the command desk. As on the web, Gow says, the two publications have ‘more fluid identities’.

Each department desks now has embedded digital journalist. Under the old system ‘they just used to sit in the corner away from everyone else’ said Gow. Now they espouse the need for web content and ensure the website remains an area of focus for each department on each title now that they break 99 per cent of their stories online.

Video is a separate entity altogether – one video journalist is responsible for managing libraries, cutting pieces and training newsroom staff and reporters in video-journalism.

She has trained eight other staff so far, giving them a week’s hands-on training so that they can manage handicams and cut footage. They aim for a new web video each day.

SUBBING

A pool of eight subs work across the Echo, the England and Welsh Daily Posts, Huddersfield Examiner, the Chester Chronicle, the Merseyside and North Wales weekly papers on a rota basis.

There are also title-specific staff who work primarily for each paper – ‘champions’ of each brand, adds Gow.

This approach has shifted subs from thinking they work for a single publication, she said, to a ‘hive-mind’ where they work across several titles.

Similar Posts:

Election 2.0: blogs, video and mobile streaming out in force for local election coverage

ruth morgan — Thu, 01 May 2008 16:40:00 +0000

The BBC’s coverage of today’s local elections will feature live blogging, with comments being expertly sifted by Newsnight and BBC News 24 presenter Emily Maitlis, assisted by leading political bloggers Iain Dale, Luke Akenhurst and Alix Mortimer.

The elections see 4000 seats up for grabs at 159 councils nationally, along with the London Mayoralty and the London Assembly.

“It’s become increasingly clear that the web has something extra to offer on election night. An elaborate network of opinion formers, activists and analysts collide online producing fact, rumour, and mood not found anywhere else.” Craig Oliver, editor of BBC News at Six and BBC News at Ten, wrote on the BBC Editors Blog.

“While guarded politicians offer the official line on radio and TV, the web provides the unvarnished truth about what the parties are really thinking.”

Harnessing new web technology for election coverage is not exclusively the domain of national big guns. The Liverpool Daily Post and Liverpool Echo will have reporters at each of the 10 vote counts in the area, who will feed to a live blog accessible on both sites.

There will be newspaper staff at three of the counts – Liverpool, Wiral and Knowsley – using mobile phone technology to stream live reports and a TV unit will produce a video package of events. The final video version is expected to go live by 7am in time for the morning rush.

“Harnessing the new technology on the Post and Echo sites will enable us to bring the most comprehensive coverage of local elections to readers who now demand nothing less,” said Alastair Machray, editor of the Liverpool Echo, in a press statement.

The titles attempted online election coverage last year, which was viewed by over 4,000 people. The sites have since been relaunched and with improved technology the two expect the coverage to be a hit with voters.

Similar Posts: