Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog » online community

Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – starting out in social media

Laura Oliver — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 08:33:08 +0000

Social media: if you're starting out in social media remember to leave comments and reactions on other blogs and sites. This can help you network and become part of an online community, giving your work greater exposure. Tipster: Laura Oliver.

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

OJB: Why people stop blogging

Laura Oliver — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 09:36:58 +0000

Paul Bradshaw's theory on why people stop blogging: 'They do not become part of an online community'. "There is a moment at which the momentum of starting a blog fades, and a new momentum - the regular input of community - is needed to continue," he says.

Harpers relaunches as TalkingDrinks.co.uk

Laura Oliver — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:53:40 +0000

The website for the wine and spirits industry Harpers.co.uk is relaunching with a new name and expanded coverage of the industry.

The Nexus Business Media title will be called TalkingDrinks.com from July 24 and will include a range of new interactive features, such as blogs and forums, a press release from the publisher said.

Breaking news will continue to lead the site, but the new features will build an online community for the industry, David Shrimpton, Nexus Business Media digital managing editor, said.

Future plans for the site will bring more photo and video content and a personalised MyTalkingDrinks section.

“We don’t do magazines online. We make great magazines, and great online business experiences,” Neil Thackray, Nexus’ chief executive, added.

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Digital Journal launches revenue sharing for its citizen journalists

ruth morgan — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 14:06:38 +0000

Digital Journal has relaunched its citizen journalism site, which now includes a revenue sharing initiative for citizen journalists.

Regular contributors to the site can now qualify for a share of the ‘moneypot’ made up from advertising revenue and the site has reportedly already paid out $38,000 to citizen journalists.

The initiative applies to news stories, rather than blogs, journals, groups, photos or video, and is calculated on the number of news stories each citizen journalist uploads rather than purely on the popularity of individual posts.

Citizen journalists who would like to be paid for their contributions must first have their work approved by the Digital Journal board to ensure they ‘have a solid understanding of spelling and grammar, and can show an ability to find and research relevant news.’

The move distinguishes the social news site from competitors such as Newsvine and Norg as the first online community to share a portion of revenue, albeit to a small percentage of its total users.

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Online Journalism Scandinavia: Personality pays in the pay-per-click economy of blogging

Oliver Luft — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 14:46:03 +0000

Kristine Lowe’s (left) Online Journalism Scandinavia this week looks at the demand for celebrity bloggers in Sweden.

Swedish lifestyle sites are using celebrity bloggers to drive traffic and to help lure attractive advertisers to their sites.

Swedish blogger Katrin Schulman (below) recently made it known she was keen to move her delicately named blog, Fuck you right back, away from lifestyle site Stureplan.se, in search of a pay per click deal.

Schulman is big news in the Swedish blogosphere. She is married to one of the nation’s most successful bloggers (neither known for mincing their words, hence the name of her blog), her husband is also part of a family that is old, aristocratic and influential in its own right.

She told the Swedish media: “I only work on commission. Four pence per unique visitor per month,” and promised to deliver nothing short of 120,000 visitors to any potential site wanting to host her blog.

It’s a far cry from the digital era sweatshop described by The New York Times.

She was eventually hired by Sthlmsfinest.com, a website and online community focused on celebrities and a direct competitor of Stureplan, which is a general lifestyle magazine and site born out of Stockholm’s club scene.

“We have seen a 15,000 increase in visitors just in the couple of days Katrin has been blogging here. She has a lot of readers,” Alexander Erwik, editor-in-chief of Sthlmsfinest, told Journalism.co.uk.

All the bloggers the site hired by Sthlmsfinest.com to write high-profile blogs about music, fashion and trends have to bring in their own audiences, Erwik added.

He also said that he hoped that in just two weeks hiring Schulman would have brought a substantially traffic increase from 70,000 users to around 100,00 readers to the site.

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Facebook useful to local news? If it opened up the networks

Oliver Luft — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 14:24:58 +0000

The Guardian may be adopting strategies to make itself more Facebook-friendly but the lack of truly local geographical networks on the social networking site makes it more difficult for smaller papers to make great use of it.

The UK currently has 17 regional networks that users can become part of, here they are:

The regional networks, which unsurprisingly centre on larger towns and cities, offer reporters a great ‘in’ to the online community on their patch. A reporter working for the Manchester Evening News, for instance, or one of its smaller titles in the Greater Manchester area is at a distinct advantage over a reporter working on a paper in a smaller town:

Just a brief, cursory glance at the Manchester group throws up leads for several potential stories amongst its 500,000 plus members. The ‘See what’s popular’ feature and the discussion board make it a simple place to seed stories as well as one in which to ask for information and pick up leads. But where would you go if you lived in Burton on Trent?

Burton is a town in Staffordshire that – if you’ve defining it in terms of Facebook regions – is slap bang between Nottingham and West Midlands. Not much use then if you’re a reporter on the Burton Mail.

Burton has 103 groups related to it on Facebook – a lot of ground to cover for any hack – but like many other towns across the UK it has no network and Facebook doesn’t allow users to establish there own networks. Users have to make that request to the site:

If Facebook gave it’s users the ability to create these networks themselves it would solve a lot of headaches, but don’t expect that to happen in a hurry. So come on reporters on papers in Burton, Derby, Reading, Cardiff, Norwich and the like. Get a campaign going to get your town recognised as a network on Facebook. It can make the day job a hell of a lot simpler.

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75 per cent of online publishers see vertical search as way to reclaim online community from Google, survey claims

Oliver Luft — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 13:42:25 +0000

Nearly three quarters of online publishers see the benefit of developing vertical search engines as a way to claw back online communities from Google, a study published last month has claimed.

E-consultancy – with Convera – conducted a survey of search behaviours with over 500 professional and business internet users.

(Vertical search report – register here to get sent it)

As part of the study it asked 116 online publishers what benefits vertical search would bring.

Nearly 75 per cent of respondents to the question suggested one advantage of offering vertical search across their websites would be to reclaim online communities from Google. Forty two per cent felt this would be a major benefit.

Nearly 94 per cent of publishers felt that vertical search would also benefit sites through improving authority and enhancing brand awareness.

Keeping users on site (87 per cent) and potential to monetise though advertising (83 per cent) also ranked highly as benefits.

The online publishers felt the major disadvantages of vertical search were the hassle of support and maintenance – 71 per cent of respondents saw it as a downside – and that it may point users toward competitors – 69 per cent.

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