#FollowJourn: Justin Williams
Who? Assistant editor at the Telegraph Media Group, specialising in technology.
Where? More details on his LinkedIn page
Contact? Follow @justin_williams.
Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips every day, we’re recommending journalists to follow online too. They might be from any sector of the industry: please send suggestions (you can nominate yourself) to judith or laura at journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.
This list is doing the rounds under the headline 100 Best Blogs for Journalism Students… and we’re not on it. Nope, not even a smidgeon of link-love for poor old Journalism.co.uk there.
The BachelorsDegreeOnline site appears to be part of e-Learners.com, but it’s not clear who put the list together. Despite their omission of our content and their rather odd descriptions (e.g: Adrian Monck: ‘Adrian Monck writes this blog about how we inform ourselves and why we do it’), we admit it is a pretty comprehensive list; excellent people and organisations we feature on the site, our blog roll and Best of Blogs mix – including many UK-based ones. There were also ones we hadn’t come across before.
In true web 2.0 self-promotional style, here are our own links which any future list-compilers might like to consider as helpful links for journalism students:
And here are some blogs/sites also left off the list which immediately spring to mind as important reading for any (particularly UK-based) journalism students:
Organisations
Individuals
Writing this has only brought home further the realisation that omissions are par for the course with list-compilation, but it does inspire us to do our own 101 essential links for global online journalists – trainees or otherwise. We’d also like to make our list inclusive of material that is useful for, but not necessarily about, journalists: MySociety for example.
Add suggestions below, via @journalismnews or drop judith at journalism.co.uk an email.
Andy Burnham’s proposals for partnerships between the local press and the BBC won’t save regional newspapers, argues Justin Williams.
“How would allowing Google News to classify this stuff as duplicate content help? And how exactly would reproducing a few semi-local videos from the Beeb boost the uniques at borcestshirebilge.co.uk?” he asks.
Great post from Telegraph assistant editor Justin Williams on changes to production under the Financial Times’ Newsroom 2009 project and the Tele’s own trials with new sub-editing processes.
But, says Williams:
“What has and continues to hold this up is the technology. Editorial CMS suppliers continue to market products that, although making the process of web publishing easier and faster, still rely upon the buyers maintaining large production departments to manage the print pages.”
Spelling, grammar, style checks, page construction and more should be automated, he argues.
Spotted by Justin Williams – The Sun has purchased ‘Natasha Richardson’ as Google keywords, following the death of the actress.
As raised when the Guardian mistakenly bought the search terms ‘Madeleine McCann’, how much is too much when it comes to search engine marketing?
Courtesy of Justin Williams, assistant editor at the Daily Telegraph, comes this map of independent news websites in the UK:
The featured sites present a snapshot of how the definition of local news and news providers is changing with dedicated ‘news’ sites mapped alongside village information websites and campaign groups.
Justin is still looking for more examples – if you’ve got one/run one, contact him via his blog or on Twitter
“Google News and our response to it as an industry are seriously distorting our web-based publishing models,” writes the Daily Telegraph’s Justin Williams.
Resources may be poured into ratings chasing, while content with revenue potential is ‘stripped to feed the newsroom beast’.
Rounding off last night’s discussion panel hosted by New Media Knowledge on the future of the newspaper industry, panelists were asked what or who they would put their money on for success and survival over the next few years.
Martin Stabe, media blogger, former new media editor of Press Gazette and online editor of Retail Week, plumped for niche and expert content:
“I would bet on anyone who can create unique, high quality content. I’d bet on the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal – those corners of more generalist publications that become more expert,” he said.
Newspapers need to have ‘the ability to compete with all the freely produced expert content that is sometimes better than what is produced by the professionals’, he added.
Neil McIntosh, head of editorial development at Guardian.co.uk, agreed that niche coverage could help newspapers compete with the blogosphere.
“In areas where blogs are working really well, mainstream media has two options: to raise its game and start covering those niches better; or it can get out and as Jeff Jarvis says, ‘do what you do best, and link to the rest’,” said McIntosh
“Those are two areas where mainstream media can move forward but it’s about acknowledging that this world exists.”
Assistant editor at Telegraph Media Group, Justin Williams said trusted brands and content areas such as finance, politics and certain sports are best placed to survive.
“Brands that are trusted and valued no matter how they are produced, those brands will still be here in 10 years time. You’re looking at areas like finance, politics, certain kinds of sport, where we still thrive. During the financial crisis most of us have turned to established news outlets,” said Williams.
“We’re positioned in those markets already, if we can hone in on what’s important to our readers and deliver it in a smart way, then we [newspapers] can be here in 10 years time.”
Are there people in the media currently who can take the ‘radical action’ required to drive newspapers forward, Justin Williams, assistant editor of Telegraph Media Group, asked an industry gathering last night.
Speaking at New Media Knowledge’s (NMK) ‘What happens to newspapers?’ event, Williams said the Telegraph had ‘dropped the baton’ after it launched online and ‘seeded the ground for the Guardian very quickly’.
“We’ve been playing catch up for the last two or three years. What is required is radical action. I’m not certain at the moment we have the people in the industry who have the ideas to be radical enough. I think we’re constantly behind the curve with technological change and development,” he said.
“No matter how fantastic our newsroom looks and our web-first model is, we still look at things through the prism of newspapers.”
This ‘prism of newspapers’ is driving publishers to look at e-reading and e-paper technology, which is tied to the idea of print and, if the current fortunes of the print format are considered, ‘the world has moved so far beyond’, Williams said.
Yet changes may be driven by new recruits at the Telegraph, including ‘some pretty young people’, who ‘think utterly differently about what we [the Telegraph] publish and how we interact with it’.
New staff, he added, have been challenging the traditional idea of linear storytelling, suggesting a more ‘horizontal’ approach, for example starting with an interactive idea rather than a text article.
“They’re not necessarily coming from a news editor deciding what the agenda is and driving it down through the chain. It’s actually picking up on something that’s far more ethereal. It’s not user-generated content, it’s something far more nebular than that. It seems to feed an appetite,” explained Williams.
The title is keen to employ people who are ‘able to manipulate data in innovative ways’, he added. A specialist in data and mapping is currently being sought, though the paper has struggled to find the right candidate as yet, Williams said.
Speaking at New Media Knowledge’s (NMK) ‘What happens to newspapers?’ event last night, Justin Williams, assistant editor at Telegraph Media Group, drew the audience’s attention to a new aggregation feature being used in Telegraph.co.uk’s recently relaunched finance channel.
A timeline of the current global recession has been created using free third-party tool Dipity. The timeline, which can also be viewed as a map, flipbook or list, aggregates both Telegraph content and items – predominantly news articles – from other titles.
Aggregating from external sources, which in this instance include the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and CNN Money, is a first for the site, Williams said.
