#FollowJourn: Justin Williams

Who? Assistant editor at the Telegraph Media Group, specialising in technology.

What? Has a regular technology blog at Telegraph.co.uk

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.

• #FollowJourn: @rebeccats/reporter
• #FollowJourn: @MarcusWa/online editor
• #FollowJourn: @paulcockerton/web editor
• #followjourn: @catherinegee – Catherine Gee/journalist
• #FollowJourn: @richardkendall/web editor

This list is doing the rounds ‘100 Best Blogs for Journalism Students – Learn-gasm‘… 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:

• Journalism.co.uk for industry news, events and developments

• Journalism.co.uk Editor’s Blog for the titbits, tips, trade tools, recommendations and daily editors’ picks.

• TNTJ blog: Tomorrow’s News, Tomorrow’s Journalists

• Insite: an advanced internet research skills.news blog by Journalism.co.uk’s consulting editor and trainer, Colin Meek.

• Journalism.co.uk training section and forums.

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

• Global Voices Online – essential for anyone interested in press freedom issues (Co-founder, Ethan Zuckerman’s blog, is here)

• The Frontline Club blog, as above.

• European Centre for Journalism (EJC)

• WEF Editors’ Weblog and SFN blog.

• Crikey.com: news from down under that’s not Murdoch, or Fairfax produced.

• Press Review Blog (a Media Standards Trust project) – it’s a newbie, but already in the favourites.

• Centre for Journalism from the University of Kent

• The UK National Union of Journalists news site and its president, Jeremy Dear’s, blog

• AllMediaScotland.com

• The Independent’s Media section

• NY Times’ media section

• FT.com media section

• Press Gazette’s Peter Kirwan/The Wire

• BBC Editors’ Blog

• BroadcastNow.co.uk

• StinkyJournalism: it’s passionate and has produced many high-profile stories

• Wired Journalists

• Index on Censorship

• Demotix blog

• Reporters Without Borders

• Committee to Protect Journalists

• International Federation of Journalists (though we’ve had problems accessing their site or feeds lately)

• British Journalism Review (now in its 20th year)

Individuals

• Craig Silverman’s Regret the Error

• MST director, Martin Moore’s blog

• Clay Shirky

• CurryBet – Martin Belam’s links are canny, and provocative and break down the division between tech and journalism.

• Malcolm Coles – for SEO tips and off-the-beaten track spottings.

• Dave Lee – facilitating conversations journalists could never have had in the days before blogs.

• Joanna Geary – as above

• Marc Vallee – photography freedom issues from the protest frontline.

• FleetStreetBlues: an anonymous industry insider with jobs, witty titbits and a healthy dose of online cynicism.

• Alison Gow for a view from the regionals

• Sarah Hartley previously as above, now with more online strategy thrown in.

• The e-Grommet for links.

• Charles Arthur – for lively debate on PR strategy, among other things

• Shane Richmond’s blog at the Telegraph.

• MarkMedia (view from Scandinavia)

• Kristine Lowe (as above)

• Media Culpa (as above)

• Richard Sambrook, BBC big cheese and excellent blogger

• Justin Williams,  Telegraph assistant editor

• Matthew Buckland, media views from South Africa

• Steve Buttry

• Craig McGill – bridging journalism and PR.

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.

• #DataJourn part 3: Useful and recent links looking at use of data in journalism
• Regret the Error editor starts business column
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – data and visualisation blogs
• #followjourn: @catherinegee – Catherine Gee/journalist
• #FollowJourn: @jonswaine/reporter

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.

Full post at this link…

• BBC could share more technology with S4C/Trinity Mirror in Wales, says Trust chairman
• Lost Remote: Opportunities for local TV sites to outshine newspapers
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – understanding website analytics
• Journalism 2.0: ‘Patience is a virtue when building a local audience’
• SoE08: What next for local media?

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.

Full post at this link…

• CounterValue: Why Burnham and the Beeb won’t save the local press
• TechCrunch: New site for Hearst to semi-automate content
• BetaTales: Print journalists, beware ‘the typographers’ trap’
• Dennis Publishing launches new consumer tech site
• Yahoo releases Style Guide for writing and editing

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?

Full post at this link…

• Guardian was wrong to buy Madeleine McCann keywords on Google
• Liverpool Daily Post: Madeleine McCann keywords in every main local news story was ‘oversight’
• OJR: Using Google Trends to fine-tune your news website
• PIXSTA develops ‘image-to-image’ search engine
• CounterValue: Why Burnham and the Beeb won’t save the local press

Local media: Looking for local bloggers and independent news sites in your area? Try Justin William’s Google map of local news sites. 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 – Use happn.in to find out local Twitter trends
• Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – trawl Facebook groups for local news
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – local Twitter search
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – working with hyperlocal sites
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – ideas for original radio journalism

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

• #FollowJourn: @justin_williams/assistant editor
• Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – local media maps
• Birmingham Mail looking at developing community-based sites
• The news as niche
• Scottish newspapers claw back advertising from council jobs site

“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’.

Full story at this link…

• The Daily Beast: How Facebook’s news feed works
• Advertising Age: San Francisco Chronicle on using Demand Media content
• Outsourcing photography – what cost to local news organisations?
• Editor&Publisher: Should newspapers forget paywalls and focus on online ads?
• Folio: Publishers relishing iPhone apps

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.”

• Jeffrey McManus: Consulting for free on ‘How to save journalism’
• Former Total Politics editor to start up PR company
• Bloomberg providing news content to Yahoo Finance
• What’s new in the WSJ.com redesign
• Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – advice on social media etiquette

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.

• NMK: Telegraph uses Dipity in aggregation first
• #FollowJourn: @justin_williams/assistant editor
• #mobilemedia11: Over 55s with iPads are ‘sweet spot’ for Telegraph
• CounterValue: FT’s Newsroom 2009 and why CMS tech is holding publishers back
• NMK: ‘What happens to newspapers?’ – place your bets, please

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.

• Tool of the week for journalists – Dipity timelines
• Evening Leader plots UFO sightings with Dipity
• Liverpool Daily Post runs online diary to mark capital of culture status
• #ge2010: Digital timeline charts campaigning and media innovation online
• @press_freedom: a new Twitter service from Journalism.co.uk

We’ve been following the various Telegraph/Guardian online interactions this week:

Yesterday, Roy Greenslade published an anonymous email from a Telegraph hack, who wrote that he/she was more than a little bit fed up.  The gist of the email was that all this multimedia-ised hub-it-up lark is to the detriment of a good, healthy working life and quality journalism.

Greenslade cautiously said he was printing the letter but that he didn’t necessarily agree with its sentiment.

Over at CounterValues, Telegraph assistant editor Justin Williams was quick to pooh pooh it. And now Greenslade has put up his response to the letter – a more negative stance this time: ‘the past is another country, think positive,’ he tells his ‘emailing friend’.

Meanwhile, in another post, Williams took a swipe at the Guardian’s system of buying sponsored links and keywords. He reckons their buying is well in excess of the Telegraph’s and the Times’.

In the comments below the post, Charles Arthur, the Guardian’s technology editor, asks how many subsidised paper subscriptions the Telegraph has: ‘Is [buying sponsored links and keywords] a worse or better investment than subsidising paper subscriptions, do you think?’, he writes.

Charles Arthur is a keen Twitterer and I’ve just located Justin Williams on Twitter; all that Tweeting in agreement can be a bit boring: how about getting the discussion going in Twitterland? It’s a shame this didn’t get going earlier, with it being (unofficial?) ‘speak like a pirate day’ – that would make it fun.

Can’t wait for next week’s ABCes…

• #FollowJourn: @justin_williams/assistant editor
• TBC at high noon? Telegraph-Guardian spats
• NMK: Telegraph uses Dipity in aggregation first
• CounterValue: FT’s Newsroom 2009 and why CMS tech is holding publishers back
• Craig McGill: Pitch by Twitter, says Guardian’s Charles Arthur

The Guardian has admitted it mistakenly bought the keywords Madeleine McCann from Google.

By wrongly purchasing the keywords a link to the paper’s coverage of Madeleine’s disappearance appeared in a column of sponsored results when a search for her name was made on Google.

The newspaper has now taken down the link and has reviewed the list of keywords it owns, Marc Sands, marketing director for the Guardian, told Journalism.co.uk.

The paper’s purchase of the words Madeleine McCann was criticised by Justin Williams, assistant editor at Telegraph Media Group, on his personal blog, who said the practice showed the paper was ‘desperate’ to hold onto its position as the UK’s most popular newspaper website according to the most recent Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe) traffic figures.

“The purchase of terms is a way of getting your stories, at a cost, in front of people. It’s absolutely what everyone does all the time,” said Sands.

[advert]A search for the terms shows the Mirror currently owns the keywords McCanns cleared, while a Google search for other keywords, such as Cristiano Ronaldo, show the the Sun and Times have also purchased phrases from Google.

“It is a way of getting it [news] distributed to people who have expressed an interest in that subject,” he added.

“The issue with the Madeleine McCann keywords is an interesting one. It’s like advertising, but not really: the only reason you and I search for a term is because we are interested in that term.”

The practice had been criticised in the blog post, he said, because of the Guardian’s previous stance on the coverage of the McCann story.

“The Guardian in the past has been very critical of the coverage of Madeleine McCann, saying it has been salacious and misleading. What the person in the blog post is saying is that Madeleine McCann is not to be treated in this way, so what on earth are they doing buying keywords?”

The issue led the paper to review its list of current keywords to assess ‘what news is okay to do it with and what isn’t', he said.

The Guardian buys thousands of Google keywords relating to current news stories every week, he added. It currently owns the keywords ‘stamp duty’, ‘university league tables’ and ‘post office closures’.

“Madeleine McCann slipped through the net. You don’t approve all these [keyword purchases] every day. We would have had to say to the company that buys the keywords for us: never buy the keywords for Madeleine McCann,” he said.

Search engine marketing and search engine optimisation of newspaper websites is a ‘new area’ for publishers, added Sands.

“Everyone is working their way through and trying to remain true exactly to the principles of what they’re doing, but also to ensure that they’re getting read.”

• CounterValue: Sun buys Natasha Richardson as sponsored link
• Liverpool Daily Post: Madeleine McCann keywords in every main local news story was ‘oversight’
• BBC Two Daily Politics – Greenslade and Meyer on regulation
• Journalism.co.uk top 10 blog posts in 2007
• MediaGuardian: Sky News apologises to Robert Murat over Madeleine McCann story