The Guardian is working on a project to monitor user interaction with their website more closely.

This ‘attention data’ will then be reflected in content and community areas of the site, Tom Turcan, general manager and head of digital media development at the Guardian, told Journalism.co.uk.

Turcan would not be drawn on specifics of the plan, but said the project would involve social media firm Pluck – whose SiteLife technology is to be introduced to the community areas of Guardian.co.uk later this year.

“The principle of tracking how people use things and then reflecting it back on the site is a way to build community,” he said.

Most recommended/most e-mailed lists are basic examples of how the analysis may be used, said Turcan, but emphasis will be placed on representing ‘crowd wisdom’ in a ‘bespoke’ form.

Turcan was speaking on a panel discussing news on social networks, during which he announced the following figures for Guardian.co.uk (they are all per month):

• 2 million podcasts downloaded
• 0.5 – 1 million videos viewed
• 2 million RSS clicks
• 50,000 blog posts

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Laurel Chamberlain, director of digital media for news at Turner Media, told delegates at DNA 2008 that CNN would not be adapting its journalists or content for mobile phones in the near future.

Chamberlain, who was speaking in a panel discussion on the business of mobile news, said there was currently no need to use specially trained mobile journalists or alter content for mobile.

“There are always ways of looking at how we can condense what we put onto mobile, but at this stage I don’t think it’s necessary,” Chamberlain said.

“If people only want to read the first paragraph of a story that’s fine by me, but so far we’ve found they’re reading five or six pages of one story.”

In the UK the Manchester Evening News has been experimenting with mobile journalism, giving reporters Vodafone handsets to file news copy and pictures on the fly.

Reuters has also been conducting its own ‘mojo’ trials since last summer with reporters equipped with lightweight Nokia kits producing multimedia coverage from the US Presidential primaries and the Edinburgh International Film Festival.

But Chamberlain said such experiments were not being carried out at CNN: “I don’t think special mobile journalists are coming soon for CNN, maybe in another five years when we are only thinking about the mobile space.”Similar Posts:

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Christian Van Thillo talks about the new forms of journalism publishers need to adopt to survive at the Digital News Affairs (DNA2008) conference in Brussels today.

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