Martin Belam has produced a really useful guide for news and media organisations when responding to the kind of online crisis illustrated by the reaction to Mail Online’s publication of a piece by columnist Jan Moir and her comments on the death of Stephen Gately.

[See related links below]

Belam covers making changes (don’t do so in haste; be transparent and thorough); and planning an ‘escalation procedure’ for your online community.

It’s also important to respond to criticisms and comments everywhere your audience is looking, he says.

“It is going to get easier and easier for people to exchange outrage, and the links and information required to act on that outrage to make a complaint. You need to have a plan for what happens if you find yourself at the eye of a perfect internet storm,” he writes.

Full post at this link…

• Coverage on the Jan Moir controversy at this link.

• Comment: The rise of ’smart’ or ‘not so smart’ internet mobs and their pressure on the media

Similar Posts:

• Currybet.net: Journalists in the comment box
• Mail Online confirms withdrawal of ads on Moir article; defends free speech
• #FollowJourn: @currybet/information architect
• 21,000 complaints made to PCC over Jan Moir article; highest number in Commission’s history
• Mashable: Reddit get a redesign

Gawker is encourage commenters and readers of its site to share news, links and tips using a new tagging system.

Using a text form on the site, tagging a message with #tips for example will send it to a ‘tips’ page, where all similarly tagged submissions will be pulled together to create a stream.

Individual hashtags for different sections of the site have been introduced as part of the new Gawker Open Forums, reports Nieman Journalism Lab.

“[A]s the front pages of our sites become ever more professional, it’s even more important to allow anarchy to bubble up from below. The goal is to blur the line between our editors and commenter-contributors,” publisher Nick Denton told Nieman.

Starred contributors – e.g. those members of Gawker’s commenting community that have been given a star rating by the site’s editors – will have their tagged submissions immediately fed to the aggregated pages. Other tagged contributions will need to be flagged up by these starred users.

Full story at this link…

Similar Posts:

• Mediabistro: New Gawker.TV powered by interns; hopes site will sell ads
• Fishbowl NY: Sacked Gawker editor says Denton’s role is a conflict of interest
• Felix Salmon: Gawker sums show why it’s a ‘highly profitable media co.’
• Allvoices.com offers $10,000 reward for citizen journalists
• #FollowJourn: @nickincumbria/digital editor

News aggregation site DailyMe has launched ‘Newstogram’ – a new piece of tech that analyses the reading behaviour of users.

The idea is that publishers will be able to use this information to serve up personalised news recommendations based on a user’s individual interests.

This basic function will be free to publishers – more complex use of the data will require signing up to DailyMe’s applications.

Full story at this link…

Similar Posts:

• ReadWriteWeb: CNET signs up for Open Calais
• Chris Amico: Lessons in data journalism and ‘frameworks for reporting’
• NMA: Dennis trialling paid-for iPhone app
• Wired.co.uk: A future without journalists?
• Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – Visualising data with Many Eyes

Dan Thornton looks at how the Pareto Principle (that 80 per cent of the effects come from 20 per cent of the causes) plays out on social media and new media platforms.

“Internet access gives everyone the ability to self-publish – it doesn’t mean everyone will. Or entitle everyone to be able to make a good living out of it,” writes Thornton, who references Jakob Nielsen’s suggestion that in online communities 90 per cent of users never contribute; 9 per cent contribute a little; and 1 per cent a lot.

“[A] small number of people can get Wikipedia over 55 million U.S. visitors in a year, or create the fact that 20 hours of video are uploaded every minute (…) It doesn’t mean it’s all popular, or high quality.

“It just means that most of mainstream media is likely to end up covered in content as if it went out in a desert sandstorm – and successful businesses need to figure out how to engage and build on that 1 per cent or 20 per cent which creates the value for everyone else.”

Full post at this link…

Similar Posts:

• Digital Spy: Viewer rating of PSB goes up; programming hours down, says Ofcom
• Mumbrella.com.au: Aussies won’t pay for online news either
• Business Insider: Chart of the Day – US viewers ’still watch remarkably more video on TV than phones or online’
• Jon Bernstein: Five lessons from a week in online video
• links for 2008-07-15

Social media firm Pluck has developed a new version of its SiteLife platform – the technology currently employed by Hearst Digital and USA Today to ramp up interactive features for users.

According to a press release, the new version (3.3) offers improved search engine optimisation to make content such as comments on news articles and forums more open to search engines.

It also gives more options for publishers when managing online communities.

Pluck’s technology, which handles user comments, ratings, recommendations, image and video sharing, forums, blogs and creates social network-style profiles for users, was recently implemented by the Guardian’s Comment is Free section.

Similar Posts:

• Guardian implements Pluck on Comment Is Free platform
• 75 per cent of online publishers see vertical search as way to reclaim online community from Google, survey claims
• Guardian blogs complete move to new technology platform
• Guardian relaunches blogs and commenting features
• Guardian opens thread for Comment is Free submissions

Online communities: If you’re starting a campaign in your publication, whether student, local, national or trade press, start a social network group, for example on Facebook. It’s free and offers another way of interacting and delivering content. Tipster: Laura Oliver

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

Similar Posts:

• Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – online editorial development
• Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – Think about copyright
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – Online book with social media advice
• Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk
• Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk: applying for a job by email?

While the Daily Mail allegedly has a gentlemen’s agreement with the Telegraph not to write about each other’s parent company, it hardly seems worth pointing out that no such pact exists between the Guardian and the Telegraph online.

Over the last month a series of articles published by Guardian.co.uk has alleged various problems with or criticised Telegraph.co.uk.

The latest links the MyTelegraph section with the BNP for a second time in little over a week, detailing a blog post on the platform by BNP member Richard Barnbrook entitled ‘Blame the immigrants’.

The Guardian first made the connection between the party and MyTelegraph with an article looking into managing online communities that discussed MyT under the provocative headline ‘Platform for free speech … or hate?’ and went on to say one user ‘publishes BNP campaign literature and flyers’ on the site.

On both occasions the Telegraph emphasised the free speech ethos behind MyT, which is policed by readers who are relied upon to report offensive material.

The policy seems to be working – Barnbrook’s post has attracted over 30 comments including several from the hang ‘um and flog ‘um brigade alongside more measured anti-BNP responses.

MyTelegraph’s problems at the end of last year, as the technology firm behind its development went into administration, were also documented recently by the Guardian:

“Telegraph Media Group’s community media site MyTelegraph ‘is on life support’ until it receives an overhaul this summer, the company’s communities editor said today.

“Shane Richmond told the PPA Magazines 2008 conference that the site had suffered periodic downtime, slow page-loads and instability since the company which built it, Interesource, went in to administration late last year.”

I was there, he did say that, but then again he’d already blogged about it months before.

But then again, again. He DID say it, so it’s fair to report him saying it.

In addition to this last month’s ABCe figures showing that the Telegraph site passed the Guardian for the first time to become the UK’s most popular newspaper website in terms of unique users, seem only to have fanned the competitive fire.

The Guardian was the first to delve into the Telegraph’s recent rapid growth in unique users – from 12,283,835 in February to 17,036,081 in March, and 18,646,112 in April – suggesting a switch in internal measurement tools may have prompted the surge.

Continuing the series of pieces on the Telegraph’s online traffic – and there are a few of them now – the Guardian suggests that a review of online traffic measurement announced by JICWEBS last week was sparked by publishers concerns over the Telegraph’s recent growth.

All fair news pieces from the Guardian? Surely there can be no complaint with their reporting factual news? Well, yes there can.

After the publication of the latest Guardian piece today, Telegraph communities editor Shane Richmond came out fighting, accusing the Guardian of hypocrisy and arguing that if the charge leveled at the Telegraph is one of giving a platform to racists and fanatics then it is a charge that could well be applied to the Guardian’s Comment is Free blog.

“How about we take the view that when you have an open platform, whether it’s My Telegraph, Comment Is Free, or the internet itself, then you have to accept that a multiplicity of views will be expressed on it and that some of those views will be unpalatable to some people,” he wrote.

“If the Guardian’s attacks on our site are motivated by genuine concern, then they should look closer to home first. However, I suspect that this sustained criticism has more to do with sour grapes over recent audience trends.”

Stories about other publishers are fair game and healthy competition between the titles is to be encouraged.

But take the BNP stories and the numerous stories about the Telegraph’s web advances en masse and one may begin to wonder when healthy news reporting begins to border on the obsessive?

UPDATE – the ‘debate’ continues with a post from Shane Richmond in response to a comment left by Comment is Free editor Matt Seaton on his Telegraph.co.uk blog

Similar Posts:

• Guardian review of MyTelegraph is ‘out of touch with internet age’
• MPs’ expenses data will be officially released Thursday but how much will be edited out?
• New Telegraph political blog on the way
• Guardian implements Pluck on Comment Is Free platform
• Guardian America