Tag Archives: director of business development

Archant’s director of business development, Ian Davies dies in plane crash

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We just heard news that Ian Davies, director of business development at Archant, has died in a plane crash – as reported at the BBC, Press Gazette and in his group’s newspaper, the Norwich Evening News.

Journalism.co.uk is extremely sad to hear of this tragic accident.

On a personal note, I met Ian and some his colleagues for the first time, at the WAN conference in Amsterdam last fortnight.

Despite cornering him after a long conference session to badger him for information about Archant’s hyperlocal news plans, he was only too friendly towards me, happy to help and give suggestions for stories.

I later had opportunity to chat with him more informally and find a bit more out about his views on the media and what he does. He assured me he would always be willing to contribute to related articles.

True to his word, last week he was quick to contribute to an article I was working on at the last minute. I’m very saddened by the premature end to his life.

In an email he told me he was looking forward to working more flexibly at Archant from January, so that he could fit in more time for his passion, flying. His website shows some of his interests. That his life was cut so short, when he had so much enthusiasm for his projects, seems a particularly cruel hand of fate.

Our condolences go out to Ian’s family, friends and colleagues.

Little will be keynote speaker at the World Digital Publishing Conference

And while we’re on the theme of digital conferences in Amsterdam, news comes that the Guardian News & Media’s special adviser, Caroline Little, will be the keynote speaker at the annual World Digital Publishing Conference & Expo, to be held October 15-16.

Little was previously behind the Washington Post and Newsweek Interactive’s growth online, as their chief executive officer and publisher. She now advises the Guardian as it expands its online presence in the US.

Other speakers at the conference will include Ilicco Elia, head of mobile Europe for Thomson Reuters, Gary Clarke, director of business development for Amazon Kindle, and Frédéric Sitterlé, new media director for Le Figaro in France.

Organisers say that there are still places available at the conference.

Innovations in Journalism – Newstin

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?

I’m Jeremy Lopez, director of business development at Newstin.

Newstin is a unique, semantic and cross-language information retrieval engine with metadata tagging and data visualization capabilities.

Newstin pulls content from more than 150,000 global sources in ten different language publications; organising this content into over 650,000 topical categories.

Major features include ‘across language navigation with integrated translation’, ‘text mining,’ and ‘semantic contextual searching’.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?

Our new feature ‘Across language commenting’ – coming soon. If a reporter puts out a story in English and someone from Russia translates and reads this story and then decides to comment on it in Russian, the reporter will have the tools on the page to be able to have the Russian comment translated back into English.

With our news retrieval system we have collected and organised news in such a way that you do not have to speak Russian in order to find, say, Russian news on computer and software supplies.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?

There is a whole lot more to come. We are currently in the process of re-designing the site for easier use and enhanced features.

A few of the major features that will be functioning by the beginning of Q2 are:

1. Social Newstin – personal accounts, editable categories
2. Commenting outside of publishing, ability to create discussion groups for editors, cross language commenting
3. Sentiment analysis – tone of the story and category will be displayed

4) Why are you doing this?

News is one of the highest growth categories on the internet but the world is stuck in cultural and linguistic silos, the reason is because there is no one source that organises it all.

If the world’s web newsreaders were to cross language and cultural borders with ease so that there were no need for these linguistic barriers then we would suddenly be all on the same page.

We have usage from 193 countries already and we are trying to put up local domains to bring more access from each of them so they don’t have to first navigate with an English site.

5) What does it cost to use it?

Newstin is a free service! We will be implementing an upgraded version in the future with additional tools and access. This will be a more professionally focused service with a cost.

6) How will you make it pay?

Advertising, sponsorships, premium service in the future…to name a few.