Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog » media industry

Channel 4 (part 1): Station plans to focus more on regional content

Nigel Brown — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 11:45:00 +0000

Following up on yesterday’s Ofcom round-up, here are further reports from the House of Lords, where Channel 4 chief executive, Andy Duncan spoke at a Communications Committee hearing.

Channel 4 is unlikely to move away from London in a bid to save money, although it is keen to expand its influence around the UK. London was the centre of the UK media industry, Andy Duncan explained to the committee. Savings made from any move were likely to be ‘negligible’ at best.

Although Channel 4 is already active in places such as Glasgow, Duncan admitted the station had relatively little presence in Scotland and other parts of the UK, outside England.

The station’s CEO said that they were adept at creating good quality ‘one-off’ shows. The challenge was to create more opportunities for ‘returning’ series based in the region.

Certain Channel 4 IP, such as ‘Dispatches’ and ‘Cutting Edge’ already allow for the allocation of programming and resources focused in and around the country.

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Closing for Christmas but do keep in touch

Judith Townend — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 12:34:45 +0000

Season’s greetings to one and all! Journalism.co.uk is going to be tucking into its turkey and nut-roast dinners tomorrow, so in a short time we will be on holiday until January 2.

If you’ve got any news or ideas over the next week, please drop a line to judith at journalism.co.uk or laura at journalism.co.uk and we’ll be in touch soon.

Enjoy the break everyone, and hope your eyes rest a little from the web (though no doubt the computer screen will be replaced by the television one).

So, here’s raising an online glass to the media industry’s 2009. Let’s hope there will be some success stories to report alongside the ominous challenges that loom ahead.

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Covering media job cuts – staff facing redundancy speak online

Laura Oliver — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 12:34:07 +0000

Having set up a timeline dedicated to reporting on the sweeping job cuts affecting both senior and junior journalists alike, a trend is emerging for laid-off staff to use blogs, Twitter and other online sites and tools to capture their redundancy.

Reports such as Martin Gee’s set of Flickr images from his last day at the San Jose Mercury give a highly individual picture of how these cuts are being felt on a personal level beyond the redundancy figures and prediction stats.

In the summer, the Columbia Journalism Review started its ‘Parting Thoughts’ series, posting responses from journalists leaving the industry or facing redundancy.

At the Gannett Blog, former Gannett editor Jim Hopkins crowdsourced a blogpost of lay-offs by the publisher, listed by newspaper area – at time of writing redundancies at 72 of Gannett’s 85 US titles affected by the company’s latest round of job cuts were accounted for in Hopkins’ post.

In an open blog post last week, Ryan Carson, co-founder of web application design and events agency Carsonified, used the company’s blog to share his thoughts about staff cuts and give the reasons for making them.

Carson went on to give tips for companies looking to recession-proof their business (points that some commenters on the post argue are common sense no matter what the economic situation).

The Spokesman-Review has used its Daily Briefing blog to cover staff leaving in an equally personal and open way. News of senior staff exiting the paper, such as editor Steve Smith and assistant managing editor Carla Savalli, was broken on the blog and posts have also been penned by outgoing journalists, including Thuy Dzuong:

“Folks, it’s been fun but The layoff list for non-managers has been finalized, and I’m on it.”

Last week Silicon Alley Insider built a ‘real time’-style page to cover lay-offs at parent company Yahoo, updating it as new info came in.

(UPDATE – The Rocky Mountain News has launched iwantmyrocky.com to canvas support for the newspaper)

Despite the sad circumstances, the way in which journalists and media workers are facing redundancy in these examples shows a real engagement with online tools. A personal picture of what is happening to the industry is being documented for future reference by these staff members expressing themselves so openly (and perhaps significantly being ‘allowed’ to express themselves by their past/present employers).

What is more, while they may not hold the answers to the problems currently faced by the media industry, they shed light on how these issues are perceived and felt on the frontline. Something which employers should read and learn from.

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Rafat Ali: More job losses and major product closures for media industry in 2009

Laura Oliver — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 10:42:54 +0000

For those that haven’t seen it, here’s Bloomberg’s interview with ContentNext/paidContent founder Rafat Ali, in which he forecasts more job cuts in January and February for the media industry and major product closures by publishers and broadcasters. Ali also predicts the end of one UK or US national newspaper in the next few months.

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Online Journalism Scandinavia: Print and online integration ‘not the key to success’

Kristine Lowe — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 09:01:22 +0000

Kristine Lowe is a freelance journalist who writes on the media industry for number of US, UK and Norwegian publications. Today Online Journalism Scandinavia asks why not integrating print and online may be the way forward.

Integration is not the recipe to become a nation’s newspaper of choice, says the editor-in-chief of Norway’s leading news site.

“It is very demanding to take the poll position both in print and online as VG has done in Norway. It demands a very strong focus on both platforms,” Torry Pedersen, the editor-in-chief of Schibsted-owned VG online, Norway’s most profitable and most read news site, told journalism.co.uk.

“Print and online are different disciplines and will only become more different. Until now, we have been so fortunate as to be able to develop on our own and build our own culture,” added Pedersen.

VG.no is organised in a different company than its printed sister publication, VG (short for Verdens Gang).

This separation has transfered into dramatic success because each company has a core business with specific aims, rather than often counter productive aims of a newspaper company producing online and print under one system.

In 2006, VG.no had a profit margin of 42.1 per cent compared to the 12.6 per cent of VG’s print edition. In week 11 2008, the news site had 3m users (according to TNS Gallup).

“Our success is to a large extent built on the fact that VG online has had its own floor and been separate from the rest of the newspaper. This is changing now that VG online has become so big we need more space, but I’m adamant that VG online will be a separate news operation,” Pedersen said.

Pedersen, who has staff keeping a constant eye on worldwide online innovation, told Journalism.co.uk that he had yet to see an example of online and print integration being fully successful.

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Online Journalism Scandinavia: Should public broadcaster seek competitive advantage online by offering users content for free?

Kristine Lowe — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 12:08:01 +0000

Kristine Lowe is a freelance journalist who writes on the media industry for number of US, UK and Norwegian publications. Today Online Journalism Scandinavia asks if public broadcasters should be more restrained in the content they offer for free online.

The head of the online division of Norway’s public broadcaster (NRK) has admitted that it intends to use its public mandate of supplying content for free as a competitive advantage on the web through increasing activity with file-sharing and social networks.

“I believe all public broadcasters more and more think along the lines that it is a competitive advantage that they can deliver content without charging it for it,” said Bjarne Andre Myklebust, head of the online division of NRK.

He added that the organisation is actively working to use its public mandate as a competitive advantage to strengthen its position online.

Not only are they working to make NRK’s content more easily available to download and share on social sites, such as YouTube and Facebook, but are also experimenting with file-sharing services such as BitTorrent and Joost.

NRK recently made its first programme series available to download in Bit Torrent, they liked it so much, they are thinking of doing more. (You can read about their experiences so far here.)

The broadcaster has also been working to get its own channel up and running on Joost, a project that has been delayed somewhat by the challenge of obtaining permissions from all the copyright holders involved.

In addition, it has recently made some of its footage available to use under a creative commons license on Flickr. Something Germany’s public broadcaster has also dabbled with.

So is this the way forward? A good way to give value back to all its license fee payers, or just a way of completely skewing the competition in the broadcasting market?

What if the BBC, in a time of intensified competition, started extending its own free delivery of content across Facebook and bit-torrent sites? It’s probably only a matter of time, but is it an unfair advantage over commercial broadcasters, news and otherwise?

Is it a way of better fulfilling its public mandate, or just an outright example of the rampant commercialism of public broadcasters using public funding as an advantage against others that find it more difficult to distribute content for free?

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Online Journalism Scandinavia: More news sites using Twingly to link to blog reactions

Kristine Lowe — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 11:24:44 +0000

Kristine Lowe is a freelance journalist who writes on the media industry for number of US, UK and Norwegian publications. Today Online Journalism Scandinavia looks again at news sites linking to blogs.

Dagbladet.no, the online operation of Norway’s second biggest tabloid, has become the latest Scandinavian news site to use Twingly to show blog links to articles on the site.

Dagladet.no has been experimenting with Twingly since October last year, but last week announced that Twingly would now become the standard across the site.

However, the online newspaper said that articles dealing with very sensitive issues – those concerning murder, suicide and death – would not not have the technology applied to them.

“Our experiences with Twingly so far are very positive. There are so many interesting things happening in the blogosphere, and we think it is important that our readers can converse in their own rooms and extend the debate about our articles there,” Mina Hauge Naerland, a journalist involved with the implementation, told Journalism.co.uk.

“It’s also very interesting for us to be able to follow those conversations, it helps us improve our journalism.”

Politiken.dk, the news site of one of Denmark’s leading newspapers, started using Twingly a month ago, and the online operations of two of Sweden’s most influential newspapers, Svenska Dagbladet and Dagens Nyheter, have used Twingly for about a year.

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Online Journalism Scandinavia: Norway’s leading news sites strategies for attracting online audience

Kristine Lowe — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 13:07:23 +0000

Kristine Lowe is a freelance journalist who writes on the media industry for number of US, UK and Norwegian publications. This week Online Journalism Scandinavia looks at how Norway’s leading news sites attract their audiences.

Schibsted-owned VG’s recipe for success is to give people the diet they had no idea they craved
Norway’s public broadcaster, NRK, wants to make it easier for lazy users to take shortcuts

Frozen pizza with champagne
Schibsted’s idiosyncratic take on newspaper website design recently received mention in this excellent article by the Press Gazette (also check out Mark Comerford’s and Espen Andersen’s thoughts).

However, its VG title is perhaps in a class of its own. It’s Norway’s most read news site with 2.7m unique users and a staggering profit margin of 42 – 45 per cent for the last three years. So the way it structures content is just as, if not more, important and also needs emphasis.

“VG has the world’s ugliest website, but the great thing about it is that it lets you discover things you did not know you were interested in. Other news sites divide their content in neatly defined sections, but we believe that people will drink champagne with frozen pizza if given the choice,”said Torry Pedersen, editor-in-chief of VG online.

“That, if given the choice on the same page, people will want to read both a well argued piece on file-sharing and a story on Britney Spears’ latest escapades.”

To get even more readers to its content VG has also developed Norway’s second biggest social network, Nettby, with 657,000 members. It’s roughly half the size of Facebook in Norway and Schibsted is already in the process of exporting it to its operations in Sweden and Spain.

The world’s laziest anarchy
Despite VG’s dominance, public broadcaster NRK has almost doubled its online traffic in the last year with a 42 per cent increase in unique users – from 651,000 in the first week of 2007, to 1.1m in the fist week of 2008.

(Traffic numbers for both sites from TNS Gallup, which only counts traffic generated by Norway’s 4.7m citizens)

Part of this traffic rise can be attributed to the NRK take on how to best alert people to content they might find interesting.

“The web is the world’s laziest anarchy: people choose the least difficult path. With this in mind, we are working to be present where people are and give them the opportunity to discover us there, which means on Facebook, YouTube and other such places,” said Eirik Solheim, a media developer with NRK’s online team.

“There are three ways to deal with what is happening with social media. You choose not to be present; you choose to make your own services that can compete with Facebook, as VG has been successful with; or you choose to be present where people are to increase familiarity with your brand and strengthen distribution. We see the last option as a great opportunity,” said Bjarne Andre Myklebust, head of NRK’s online division.

Two takes on serendipity
Both news groups’ strategies play to the serendipitous nature of the web, but while VG’s approach is designed to keep readers hooked by satisfying old and newfound appetites on its site, NRK wants to increase your chances of accidentally stumbling across its content.

No doubt, NRK wants those accidental users to linger. So if it keeps its promise to open up more of its archives and make more and more of its content freely and easily available in the places – beyond its own websites – where people hang out online, it will be interesting to see which is the more successful strategy.

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Online Journalism Scandinavia: Danish news sites benefit from doing things ‘The Drupal Way’

Kristine Lowe — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 16:44:17 +0000

Kristine Lowe is a freelance journalist who writes on the media industry for number of US, UK and Norwegian publications. Here she looks at use of open-source software, Drupal, on Danish news sites.

Drupal, a long time favourite free content management system of web hacker-geeks, is going mainstream.

In Denmark, national news sites such as Information.dk, as well as media sites Mediawatch.dk and Journalisten.dk are among those who have swapped their expensive and often complicated content management systems (CMS) for the free open-source software. But open software does have its unique challenges.

Framework, not plug and play
“The price of Drupal is an in-house developer. You get some good building blocks, but you have to think of Drupal as a framework rather than as plug and play: you have to discover everything for yourself,” said Nikolai Thyssen, head of new media for Information.dk.

Information.dk launched its blog section, luftskibet.dk, with Drupal in October 2006, its main site launched with Drupal in August 2007.

(Nikolai Thyssen, left)

After the much-publicised move to Drupal, Thyssen was approached by many smaller newspapers who wanted Information.dk to develop similar solutions for them, he said.

He always refuses, believing this would go against all the compelling reasons that make the technology appealing and attractive.

The main advantage with Drupal, he says, is not having to hand over a lot of money to external providers everytime something is not working.

“I think it is important to keep the expertise in-house. You have to learn to think the Drupal Way, which is far from intuitive, but once you start working with the system it is almost self-documenting and easy to keep track of all the changes you make,” he added.

Merlin of Chaos
Drupal is a module-based system. The basic modules, or “core” contains the all the functionality needed to run a Drupal-site. In addition to this, there is a vast array of modules available to add greater functionality to the parts that have already been built and deployed. It’s just a matter of using them like building blocks on top of the core elements.

“It is important to choose modules where there is a lot of activity on the developer side as this means the modules are up-to-date. If you do not do this, you will have update the modules yourself whenever new Drupal-versions are released,” said Nikloaj Opstrup, head of development, for Mediawatch.dk

“There are many developers in Drupal,” said Thyssen added. “For instance, developer Merlin of Chaos made two of our most important modules, but we had to figure out first who we could trust [to develop the models we would use] and which modules were kept up-to-date. It took a long time.”

No helpdesk, just fanatics
Since Information.dk started using Drupal, they have launched a dedicated Newspapers on Drupal group to help others wanting to develop using the technology.

One of the problems for developing news sites this way is that open software solutions have no dedicated helpdesks and finding the right answers can prove difficult in the beginning.

“You do encounter a lot of fanatics. Those who like Drupal, love it,” said Thyssen.

“But you also get beginners and experts side-by-side in the Drupal forum and [as a result get asked] many of the same stupid questions. This has improved somewhat with our Newspapers on Drupal group, but we are also starting to get a lot of beginners there.”

Easier and less expensive
Mediawatch.dk, Opstrup added, is a niche site with some 5000 subscribers. So the fact that it needed only to spend £20,000 on developing its Drupal solution (roughly £12,000 on building modules and £6000 on programming and design, with monthly running costs of £400-600) was another plus point for the technology.

One drawback, however, has been the problem of finding necessary modules to suit development needs. Both Information.dk and Mediawatch.dk found that working with pictures can be difficult in Drupal and neither site has yet managed to find a picture-module that suits.

Overall, both were satisfied with the improved interactivity, like blog- and comments functionality, and easier publishing and editing offered by Drupal.

“The fact that you can edit straight from the site by just clicking on say the comma you want to edit is wonderful,” said Opstrup.

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New journalism training site launched by regional news veteran

Laura Oliver — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 14:45:20 +0000

Ed Oldfield, a journalist with 25 years of experience in regional newspapers, has launched training website beajournalist.com – a site aimed at those taking their first steps in the media industry.

The site offers guides to training courses in the UK, details of industry training schemes, as well as the latest training news.

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