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

Laura Oliver — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 15:07:10 +0000

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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Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – optimise search for your readers

Laura Oliver — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 09:52:04 +0000

Search: the first rule of optimising your news site for search engines is: think of your readers, not the engines. What are they searching for and what words and tools are they using to do it? The Knight Citizen News Network has more tips on SEO here. Tipster: Laura Oliver.

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

Guardian material on paidContent:UK

Judith Townend — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 14:13:08 +0000

As a result of Guardian News & Media’s acquisition of ContentNext, Media Guardian content has started to appear on paidContent:UK. Just recently the same occured vice versa: the appearance of Paid Content articles on the Media Guardian site.

In July, Journalism.co.uk reported that Guardian News & Media had bought ContentNext, behind paidcontent.org, paidContent:UK and the Indian news site contentSutra.com.

An early report by the Wall Street Journal’s AllThingsD column reported that according to sources it was a figure ‘north of $30 million.’

The deal marked a ’significant expansion’ of GNM’s US presence, a press statement said at the time.

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TechRadar.com: Japanese Yahoo lets users edit news page

Laura Oliver — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 13:16:04 +0000

Yahoo's Japanese-language news site is allowing users to submit and edit contributions. The idea is to create a wiki-style news section based on the expert knowledge of individual contributors.

Telegraph.co.uk redesign: engagement above traffic?

Laura Oliver — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:54:48 +0000

Speaking at yesterday’s preview of the Telegraph.co.uk redesign, both chief information officer Paul Cheesbrough and digital editor Edward Roussel said the new site was aimed at ‘deeper engagement’ with users.

Both declined to comment on whether the new site would bring success in terms of ABCe figures, even suggesting the amount of content/page views per user was more important at this stage than an increased numbers of visitors.

“If we have doubled the amount of content that each person is consuming [by the end of the year] then that’s great,” said Roussel.

The current average for the site is 16 page views per person per month, he added.

A raft of improvements have been made in the new design to address the issue of engagement. Firstly improved search and navigation features to help users find the content they are after more quickly and keep them on the site.

Changes to the site’s servers have also been implemented with a series of international servers set up so the experience of accessing the site is the same wherever you are, Cheesbrough explained.

These changes were made necessary after ‘power outages’ on the site last year, which brought Telegraph.co.uk down for prolonged periods. In contrast the site is now the fastest news site behind the BBC, Cheesbrough claimed.

One of the most significant changes for me – and the one which lends itself most immediately to both engagement and traffic goals – is an increase in embedded video.

Following hot on the heels of the BBC and FT, who have both made the move to embedded video, the new Telegraph.co.uk will embed its video content within articles across the site and lose the standalone Telegraph TV player box on the homepage.

The BBC’s Pete Clifton told Journalism.co.uk previously that the conversion rate – the number of people reading the text article and viewing the video footage – was around 40 per cent for embedded video and only 2 per cent when video was housed in a separate player.

Initial trials of embedding on Telegraph.co.uk have produced similarly positive results, said Cheesbrough, with a 30 per cent conversion rate for embedded videos compared to a 3 per cent rate for Telegraph TV.

It’s a logical progression that boosts views and keeps the user engaged for longer, and is part of what the team behind the Telegraph redesign refer to as ‘the concept of the article as the homepage’.

This shows an awareness that the homepage is no longer the main point of entry – around half of the site’s traffic comes through aggregators. Putting as much effort into the design and accessibiilty of every page of your site, as most publications put into their homepage, could well be a winning strategy for both traffic and engagement.

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NowPublic buys rumour-based news site Truemors

Laura Oliver — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 14:57:50 +0000

‘Crowd-powered’ news site NowPublic has bought Truemors, a site which aggregates sources backing up news rumours, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports.

The acquisition, which was made for an undisclosed sum, will expand NowPublic’s news coverage, which already has 100,000 active contributors.

Content from Truemors will feature on the NowPublic site to be used as tips for budding contributors, NP’s co-founder Len Brody told AFP.

“Truemorists are digging in the four corners of the web for the status of the rumor mill at any moment. It will drive leads to our members for stories going on around the world and give our readers a look at what’s bubbling under the hood,” he said.

As part of the deal Truemors will remain an independent company with founder Guy Kawasaki becoming chair of NowPublic’s advisory board.

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Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk: shooting web video? avoid pans and zooms

John Thompson — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 11:00:22 +0000

Audio-visual: Shooting video for your news site? Avoid pans and zooms – it looks bad on the net and camera movement slows down the video stream. Talking heads might seem boring but they are very watchable online. Tipster: Oliver Luft

Got a tip? Submit it here – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

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Sky News new beta site

Oliver Luft — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 12:35:37 +0000

Sky News has launched a beta version of its new website, to run in parallel with its existing news site.

It has adopted a top story carousel for the homepage that displays the latest breaking news in video and pictures.

It has also added a story tracker in the right column, which lets you follow a story as it develops, and in the left column a See Your News personalisation feature.

“What you are visiting is very much work in progress. We are testing and trialling new features and a very different design,” Steve Bennedik, editor of Sky News Networked Media, wrote on his blog.

“At the same time we are still offering our existing site. When we are ready, we will switch off the old site and this will be our public face.”

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Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk

John Thompson — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 08:29:44 +0000

Online publishing: Is your web framework hampering your storytelling? Then set up a blog alongside your existing site and add your videos/audio/slideshows/interactive maps to that. You can link from your existing news site and, if it’s a success, your bosses will take note. Tipster: Oliver Luft

Got a tip? Submit it here – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

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Online Journalism Scandinavia: How to kiss 713,000 teenagers and still make a profit

Kristine Lowe — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 14:31:59 +0000

Norway’s largest city is in cyberspace, and its 713 000 ‘citizens’ are generating good revenues for the newspaper that owns it.

Schibsted-owned VG.no is not only Norway’s most read and most profitable news site, it also has a social network making a nice contribution to the news site’s admirable financial results.

A city of teenagers
VG is currently earning a gross margin of more than 50 per cent from this social network, called ‘Nettby‘ (Norwegian for NetCity), Jo Christian Oterhals, head of development, VG Multimedia & chairman of Nettby Community AS, Norway, told the audience at World Association of Newspapers (WAN) conference in Gothenburg last week.

The 713,000-strong city is in fact the biggest city in Norway, bigger than the capital, Oslo.

“Teenage girls are very active here, and we all know that if you get the girls, you also get teenage boys,” said Oterhals, who explained that Nettby’s 713 citizens make up for 61 per cent of all teenagers in Norway.

This demographic is obviously an attractive one for advertisers, but premium membership is also an important source of revenue. “Premium membership is really important for us now, we have more than 50,000 paying customers at any given time,” Oterhals added.

City guards key to success
Nettby is Norway’s second biggest social network after Facebook, but VG.no is not worried about the competition from the trendy website, because the users and purpose of the two social networks are so different:

“Nettby is a place you go to meet new people; on Facebook you keep up with existing friends,” Espen Egil Hansen, managing editor of VG.no, told me on a previous occasion.

Nettby is very much like a party where teenagers hang out, flirt and meet new friends.

“But you can’t just open the door, the best parties are well administered,” said Oterhals.

“That is why Nettby has city guards, volunteers who help moderate and control Nettby,” he explained, adding that these city guards were hand-picked by Nettby’s own people.

“To throw a good party you need good planning, a place, a host, basic rules, a bouncer, an invitation and a few introduction. We try to provide all this,” said Oterhals.

No recipe to make teenagers read news
“Currently there are almost no links between VG and Nettby other than the logo, as it was very important for us when we started Nettby that the kids who came in there did not get the impression that this was their fathers’ website,” said Oterhals.

In other words, Nettby has not been a recipe to get young readers reading newspapers – a topic much discussed during WAN.

Instead, Oterhals told journalism.co.uk, part of the rational for running this social network was to be part of what is happening on the web and to figure out how young readers use the web.

“What is your competitor online is not as easy to figure out online as in print – it could be Google, it could be Facebook – so we stay awake at night thinking about what the next big thing will be, who our new competitors are,” he said

VG.no has also launched the site in Sweden, where it failed due to many Norwegian teenagers hanging out there, and more recently in Spain, where it is an add-on to the online operation of 20 Minutos, Schibsted’s Spanish freesheet.

“Analysts said Nettby’s success will last for six years max, so the challenge for us is to look at how can we repackage and launch it as new products. I think that will be our strategy for the future,” said Oterhals.

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