On Unbounce.com, writer Angela Stringfellow outlines “how to create a successful editorial calendar”, aimed at bloggers keen to ensure a steady stream of new content ideas. The post includes a run-down of the different platforms you might use to plot your calendar, including a standard day planner, WordPress or “good ol’ spreadsheets”.

See the full post here.

Tipster: Rachel McAthy

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link– we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – using online platforms in student journalism
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – reporting on the entertainment industry
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – publishing data online
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – phone and tablet tricks for blogging from the field
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – how to use forums effectively

The Financial Times has announced the launch of a new section called the A-List, claiming to offer commentary from leaders, policy makers and commentators, on FT.com and all global editions of the newspaper, based on issues “at the top of the news agenda”.

Topics will range from business, economics and finance to world politics and diplomacy. The headline commentary will be accompanied by a response from related experts to encourage debate, and readers will be able to participate and comment online.

Read more here…

This follows the launch of Bloomberg View last month, a new editorial page featuring columns and commentary across all of Bloomberg’s platforms, as announced at the end of last year.

• Bloomberg View will be ‘consistent with the values of the founder’
• TV news anchor faces law suit from rival channel
• Bloomberg runs false obituary for Apple’s Steve Jobs
• New Japanese website for Bloomberg
• Bloomberg: US publisher Gannett trialing paid-content model

Google News has made updates to allow users to further personalise the type of news they read.

Readers can now omit sites, choose to read more news from a selected site, increase or decrease the amount of blogs that appear or batch exclude all blogs from their Google News home page at one fell swoop.

Both blogs and news sites need to check how they are categorised by Google News. Just because you do not describe your site as a blog, doesn’t mean that Google News hasn’t listed you as one.

It is not clear how news sites can have their blog status removed but this form will allow your to flag it up with Google News

Hat tip: Search Engine Land

• Google News US launches ‘standout’ tag so news sites can highlight top content
• Mediating Conflict: Looking at the media ‘stealing’ stories from blogs
• The Register: Dutch news portal sued over Google page summary
• Google Public Policy Blog: Google’s open manifesto – what does it mean for publishers?
• Accessibility 2.0: The Sun and The Times

There are hundreds of people around the UK who are a dab hand at covering the world of media on their blogs and on twitter, and so it has been a difficult task drawing up lists of our personal favourites. But we have done some list-whittling and each present our five favourite bloggers and five favourite tweeters.

Please add your own in the comments below, or via Twitter to @journalismnews.

Our top five journalism blogs and tweeters of 2010

As chosen by John Thompson, founder, Journalism.co.uk:

Best blogs:

Nieman Lab
10,000 words
Virtual Economics
The Media Blog
Wannabe Hacks – for the initiative shown

Best on Twitter:

@malcolmcoles, @currybet, @psmith, @joshhalliday, @suellewellyn

As chosen by Laura Oliver, editor, Journalism.co.uk:

Best blogs:

Currybet – Martin Belam
Headlines and Deadlines – Alison Gow
David Higgerson
Ed Walker
Feverbee

Best on Twitter:

@psmith, @joshhalliday, @gdnlocal, @sashers, @fieldproducer

Special mentions for their recent WikiLeaks twitter coverage: @aleximostrous, @fieldproducer, @newsbrooke. And for tweeting about being shot during Thailand’s Red Shirt protests: @andrewbuncombe

As chosen by Joel Gunter, sub-editor, Journalism.co.uk:

Best blogs:

Currybet – Martin Belam
After Deadline – New York Times
Pressthink – Jay Rosen
Headlines and Deadlines – Alison Gow
Malcolm Coles

Best on Twitter:

@sashers – for her formidable live tweeting
@aleximostrous – for his Twitter WikiLeaks coverage
@substuff – for hilarious insights into the world of consumer magazine subbing
@guardianstyle – for running an on-demand style guide on Twitter
@wannabehacks – just missed the blog category but deserve a mention for hard graft and good content

• Top five UK journalism blogs and Tweeters in 2009 (and who to watch in 2010)
• #FollowJourn: @currybet/information architect
• UK Media regulation – what’s the future?
• Martin Belam: The death of RSS? Not at the Guardian
• #DataJourn part 3: Useful and recent links looking at use of data in journalism

The DailyFinance profiles Handpicked Media, an independent blogs network covering women’s fashion, beauty and lifestyle which has recently signed up new blogs and added Debbie Djordjevic, former editorial director at Hearst Digital, to its ranks.

Bloggers and the publishers get together every six weeks or so socially, and blogs keep 65 per cent of the revenue earned from their sites.

That revenue is generated because, as a collective with key opinion-formers and influential bloggers on its rosta, Handpicked can bring in more advertising and create more opportunities than any single blog, presenting agencies and advertisers with a single point of contact.

Full story on DailyFinance at this link…

• JEEcamp: online revenue models – the Waghorn way
• Vanity Fair’s view of the blogosphere
• Hyperlocal ad trial spreads to Guardian Local’s Edinburgh and Cardiff sites
• Blogs make money and live long lives: Technorati’s 2008 report
• Technorati: 72 % bloggers surveyed report no income related to blogging

US media ethics project StinkyJournalism has done some digging into the issue of blogs on newspaper websites and whether these posts fall under the same editing process as other items on the site.

During the recent financial downturn, some US newspapers, including the Seattle Post Intelligencer and the Christian Science Monitor, have stopped publishing print editions altogether, opting for online-only editions. All major US newspapers have a representative internet presence and publish much more content online than they could fit into their print editions. Along with this change, social media as an integrated tool plays a role in the news landscape now more than ever. However, these changes also raise questions about ethics, legal issues and journalistic standards.

Therefore, StinkyJournalism thought it would be worthwhile to learn more about how newspapers manage blogs published on their websites. We looked at 10 major US newspapers and their 591 published blogs. We categorized the blogs based on their content and took notice of the blogs’ authors. Some of the results were unexpected, even surprising.

You can read the full results of the study at this link on the StinkyJournalism site, but some key findings were:

• 404 of 591 (68 per cent) blogs published by newspapers were edited, according to the newspapers themselves;
• Only eight of the 591 blogs – 1 per cent – dealt with traditional news;
• Seven of the 10 newspapers studied said they edit all blogs.

• Online news as trustworthy as print for majority of readers, survey claims
• Ninety-seven per cent of ‘business decision makers’ use B2Bs online
• iPad news: would you pay more?
• Nieman: Blogs, SEO chief and Facebook comments result in traffic increase for LA Times
• Associated Newspapers claim monthly reach of 22 million

Following the launch of TBD.com, an online local news platform in Washington DC, the Online Journalism Review has published an interview with Steve Buttry, director of community engagement.

OJR’s Robert Niles asks what the near future holds for the site, which combines the work of two television stations, local journalists, online bloggers and other community sites.

We looked for blogs covering local news, life and issues. We looked for blogs that appeared to provide quality content and post frequently. Washington has lots of outstanding blogs covering national and international affairs that we didn’t invite. We may at some point add a “Washington people” section, but at this point, we have decided not to include any of the many outstanding blogs that are primarily personal. We have some blogs that are mostly about cooking. They have been told that we will be more likely to link to a post that has a sense of place (here’s the recipe that I used to cook the eggplants I got at the Reston Farmers Market) than just a recipe.

See the full post here…

• E&P: Washington Post survey suggests hyperlocal moves are afoot
• Is the local coffee shop the new newsroom?
• Washington Post wins record six Pulitzer Prizes
• Election 2.0: Will it be ‘gotcha’ time for journalists?
• Washington Post maps local blog coverage

Using its channels feature, blog search engine Twingly has done a rough analysis of which traditional news organisations in 10 European countries are “best loved” by social media.

The site looked at the “top stories” of the day for each of the news sites and calculated the references and links shared to them on social sites, including blogs and Twitter.

Comparing all these, there are quite some striking scenarios to look at. The strongest Channels in terms of linking blogs and tweets are without a doubt UK and Sweden. Taking a closer look at both, one notices that all top stories on the Swedish Channel usually have far more blog posts referring to them than tweets! In Norway it looks largely the same – almost all top stories get discussed more on blogs than on Twitter.

Full post on Twingly at this link…

• Online Journalism Scandinavia: More news sites using Twingly to link to blog reactions
• Online Journalism Scandinavia: Here come the Web 2.0 docusoaps
• Online Journalism Scandinavia: VG.no adds blog trackbacks to articles with Twingly
• Site changes at Sky News and Channel 4 sites
• Late Night Marketing: How one newspaper lost 5,000 incoming links

After less than a year of being available to the public, Google Wave is being phased out as the web giant admits that it hasn’t attracted enough users.

It was unveiled to great fanfare in May 2009, and was heralded by some online tech sites as the future of e-mail and online collaboration, but what are those sites saying now that it’s bitten the dust?

TechCrunch

TechCrunch then (May 2009): “Wave offers a very sleek and easy way to navigate and participate in communication on the web that makes both email and instant messaging look stale”

“It’s ambitious as hell — which we love — but that also leaves it open to the possibility of it falling on its face. But that’s how great products are born. And the potential reward is huge if Google has its way as the ringleader of the complete transition to our digital lives on the web.”

TechCrunch now: “Maybe it was just ahead of its time. Or maybe there were just too many features to ever allow it to be defined properly.”

ReadWriteWeb

ReadWriteWeb then (June 2009): “Once you get into the flow of things, regular email suddenly feels stale and slow. “

“Like any great tool, Wave gives its users a lot of flexibility and never gets in your way.”

ReadWriteWeb now: “Why did Wave fail? Maybe because if you don’t call it an ‘email-killer’ (and you shouldn’t) then you’d have to call it a ‘product, platform and protocol for distributed, real time, app-augmented collaboration.’ That’s daunting and proved accessible to too few people.”

“Maybe this failure should be chalked up as another example of how Google ‘doesn’t get social’ in terms of user experience or successful evangelism. After an immediate explosion of hype, it never felt like Google was really trying very hard with Wave.”

Mashable

Mashable then (May 2009): “Our initial impression of Google Wave is a very positive one. Despite being an early build, communication is intuitive and not cluttered at all. User control is even more robust than we first expected (…) [I]t’s not as complicated as it seems at first look. It’s only slightly more complicated than your standard email client.”

Mashable now: “The product might’ve been more successful had it been integrated into Gmail (basic e-mail notifications weren’t even part of the launch), though Google hasn’t had much success with Buzz in that department either.

“In any event, Wave represents another disappointment in Google’s long line of attempts at social, an area in which the company is now reportedly eyeing a completely new approach. Shutting down Wave, it would seem, is a logical step in moving on.”

Pocket-lint

Pocket-lint then (October 2009): “Google Wave in its current state is an impotent, stunted, stub of a web service, which is functional at best, and buggy at worst. But it’s also the future. Consider the state of Twitter in 2007 – it was just a website with little messages that people pushed out via SMS. No one was terribly impressed.”

Pocket-lint now: “Although the web at large hasn’t embraced Wave in the way in which Google would have hoped, it is a sad day for its users. But it is a platform that would have only really worked if it reached out to a mass audience, and disappointingly, it never did.”

Techie Buzz

Techie Buzz then (September 2009): “Wave is an awesome real-time service for sharing docs, sending emails and much more. In-fact it is the most anticipated product of the year and people are already desperate to get their hands on a invite.”

Techie Buzz now: “I still believe that Wave deserved all the attention it received. It truly was a revolutionary service. Unfortunately, Wave might have been too different for its own good. Many failed to grasp the concept of Wave and struggled to get started, while several others grew frustrated with the chaotic nature of an open ended communication platform like Wave.”

Finally, from Lifehacker’s Gina Trapani, who wrote a book on Google Wave with Adam Pash, an elegy for the beleagured platform:

Wave is a tool I love and use daily, and this announcement makes Adam’s and my user guide essentially a history book, an homage to a product that I believe was simply ahead of its time.

I respect any product that shoots as high as Wave did, even if it misses in the market.

• LA Times: Eight ways Google wave could ‘transform journalism’
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – using Google Wave for liveblogging
• #followjourn: @paullamkin – Paul Lamkin/tech journalist
• #followjourn: @dansung – Dan Sung/technology journalist
• BusinessWeek: Google sued over Buzz privacy issues

Fascinating round-up from David Dobbs about the exodus of science bloggers from the ScienceBlogs network, part of the Seed Media Group magazine title, over the launch of a new blog sponsored by PepsiCo.

The origins of the PepsiCo blog – money rather than merit – would not have matched those of other bloggers on the network: it’s an issue of credibility and trust between the readers and writers, says Dobbs.

Does this advertising-editorial wall ensure good journalism? Unfortunately, no; people find other ways to botch journalism. But in the murky world of media, we need a few firm lines to keep us away from slippery slopes. This pact between publisher, writer, and reader provides one of the most vital. It forms the foundation of reader trust; violating it erodes that foundation. Ads are a necessary evil. Credible publications present them unambiguously as third-party commercial messages so the reader instantly knows someone is selling something. That’s why patching a couple of stickers on a blog that presents itself in every other way as editorial content, as Seed proposed before killing the Pepsi blog, doesn’t work. It’s like sticking a lapel button on a guy at the front of the church in a tuxedo and expecting us to think he’s not part of the wedding. The guy needs different clothes.

Full post on Comment is Free…

Correction: this post has been amended to show that it is Seed Media Group not AOL’s Seed that run ScienceBlogs.

• Knight News Challenge names community news project as winner
• #BeMyGuest – a call to guest bloggers
• Citizen Media Law Project: A new bill to aid protection for bloggers
• Gawker: Gawker to sell three blogs from its network
• The Guardian launches science blogs network

Blogging on New Statesman, Laurie Penny writes:

Cosy members of the established commentariat eye bloggers suspiciously, as if beneath our funny clothes and unruly hair we might actually be strapped with information bombs ready to explode their cultural paradigms and destroy their livelihoods. This sort of prejudice is deeply anodyne.

Bloggers aren’t out to take away the jobs of highly-paid columnists: we’re more ambitious than that. We’re out for a complete revolution in the way media and politics are done. While the media establishment guards its borders with paranoid rigour, snobbishly distinguishing between “bloggers” and “journalists”, people from the internet have already infiltrated the mainstream.

Penny adds some great insight from online publisher, blogger and “digital activist” Cory Doctorow into bloggers’ role as “the fifth estate” with an ability to challenge and bring down traditional media approaches to commentary, especially political commentary. She concludes:

One thing, however, is certain: journalism is changing forever. The notion of political commentary as a few-to-many exercise, produced by highly-paid elites and policed by big business, has been shattered beyond repair.

Full story at this link….

• Currybet.net: Will social media’s influence on political engagement continue post-election?
• Online commenters are like ‘particularly aggressive sub-editors’ says Guardian’s Andrew Sparrow
• ConservativeHome blogger granted lobby pass
• Bloggers to stand in Malaysian election
• William Hague and the power of the political blogger

Avid Life Media, the owner of sites including Hotornot.com, has reportedly partnered with “two prominent gossip bloggers” to make a $20 million bid Perez Hilton’s leading gossip website.

Full story at this link…

• RyanSpoon.com: Perez Hilton site attracts 13.9m page views
• Guardian: Perez Hilton to blog for ITV
• ‘Facebook Effect’ developing widgets boosts your site traffic
• Spleak launches new online communities
• Media Week: Times website loses 1.2m readers

Social media: Need to convince a colleague or boss that using social media can benefit your work? Show them this piece from Mashable on ‘How journalists are using social media for real results’. Tipster: Laura Oliver.

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

• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – monitoring social media sites
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – filtering social media information
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – real-time Twitter search updates
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – social media job hunting
• Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – iPhone news apps

Job seekers: If you’ve recently been made redundant and need some blogging succour read our blog series The Jobless Journalist and Trials of a Redundant Journalist. Tipster: Laura Oliver.

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

• Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – building a better blog
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – the best WordPress plugins for journalists
• Trials of a redundant journalist: Don’t forget the contacts
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – third-party posts on a WordPress blog
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – WordPress plugins for the newsroom

Maggie Shiels speaks with the team behind blogging platform Blogger, which has reached the 10-year mark and now has more than 300 million active users.

Is blogging on its way out or will the platform mark its 20th anniversary?

Full story at this link…

• comScore: Social media accounts for one out of every six minutes spent online in US
• Reuters: Google+ gets 25m users in four weeks
• Magtastic Blogsplosion: Interview with team behind Mygazines
• Guardian blogger calls for other London bloggers
• Radio4Today: Would Orwell have been a blogger?