A fantastic blog post from Alison Gow, executive editor, digital, at the Liverpool Daily Post and Echo, on her recent job swap with an executive editor on the print side of the operation while the Liverpool FC “sale/saga” broke.

She describes the difficulties of creating a Late Final edition with a solid tip but no confirmation that NESV (New England Sports Ventures) had completed the deal.

Everyone in the newsroom was becoming increasingly desolate as the late special idea looked set to fall down. The confirmation came, we managed to get it online (and cached, for once) before Sky and the BBC were even reporting it and there were celebrations at landing a web exclusive.

Then it turned out we had a print one as well… Echo editor Ali Machray had quietly got the front page change made – including a story announcing the sale, and had sent to the printers on the off-chance. So bundles of the latest news were in vans heading back to outlets on Merseyside… bundles that would have been pulped if no announcement had come through.

Helpfully, she also runs through the elements of print and online coverage that worked well and were valued by readers and those that were not.

Full post on Headlines and Deadlines at this link…

• #FollowJourn: @alisongow/executive digital editor
• Liverpool Post and Echo take part in Lennon bed-in recreation
• Liverpool Daily Post: Company bans local journalist’s blog
• Headlines and Deadlines: Journalist tweets being shot or why Twitter works
• #FollowJourn: @kmatt/head of web and data

A daily round-up of all the content published on the Journalism.co.uk site. You can also sign up to our e-newsletter and subscribe to the feed for the Journalism Daily here.

News and features:

• Trinity Mirror enters consultation as Midlands businesses forecast to lose more than £6m for 2010
• Telegraph communities editor Shane Richmond takes on new role
• Comment: Readers or advertisers? The industry’s chicken and egg conundrum
• Smart Move: Andrew Ward appointed Nordic Bureau Chief at the Financial Times

Ed’s picks:

• NUJ Release: NUJ condemns more job cuts at Trinity Mirror regionals
• Beet TV: Time.com managing editor on why long-form journalism doesn’t work on the web
• Mashable: Wikipedia’s new editorial layer
• csmonitor.com: Israeli officials seek Swedish government condemnation of organ theft story
• Globe and Mail: ‘The model, the blogger and the web giant’
• The Wrap: ‘Is ESPN The Mag committing ‘publishing suicide’?’

Tip of the day:

• Using Twitter as a point of contact

#FollowJourn:

• @benjaminbland/Freelance journalist

On the Editors’ Blog:

• MirrorFootball.co.uk: Bringing Liverpool fans a better result
• Comment: Without traineeships going to trainees, how can we get experience?
• Advice from Guardian.co.uk’s online journalism Q&A

• Sky News: Trinity Mirror approached Mecom for merger
• The top 10 most-read stories on Journalism.co.uk, 4-10 June
• Guardian: Trinity Mirror and DMGT mulled merger of regional media
• #FollowJourn: @davidhiggerson/head of multimedia, Trinity Mirror
• Globeandmail.com: Future of newspapers debate at 1pm ET on Tuesday

Hats off to football site Off The Post for this excellent spot – which has now correctly attributed the spot to Keith Belfast’s blog.

It seems the Mirror’s new football website, launched last month, gave an alternative match report for last night’s game between Liverpool and Aston Villa.

The site’s Twitter account @mirrorfootball tweeted the final score as 1-0 Liverpool. In reality the side suffered their second defeat of the season and it finished 3-1 to Aston Villa (as correctly reported elsewhere on the site):

Automation problem or just a dreaming Liverpool fan behind the account? Perhaps it’s fantasy football goes Twitter? Journalism.co.uk has contacted the team and is hoping to find out. As of 4:18pm today the tweet was still there…

• Spot.us celebrates first community funded news article
• Paper.li launches Twitter newspapers
• TEAMtalk goes all a Twitter for football finale
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – How to check the score of your Facebook page
• Guardian seeks independent producer for football podcast

It was an ‘oversight’ that Madeleine McCann related keywords were included in the metadata for every main local news story on the Liverpool Daily Post site, a Trinity Mirror spokeperson said, after Journalism.co.uk informed the company that the terms were present in the ‘hidden text’ of a series of unrelated news items.

The automatic inclusion of the keywords “madeleine mccann, madeleine mcgann, kate mcgann, kate mccann” in the HTML for Liverpool news stories has now ceased.

Journalism.co.uk learned in May that specific keywords, including those above, were used in the metadata for the ‘Liverpool News Headlines’ section on the Liverpool Daily Post site, regardless of the story’s relevance. This continued for at least one month before it was drawn to the Post’s attention on Monday (June 29).

Use of unrelated ‘hidden’ metadata is commonly known as ‘keyword stuffing’, a practice which Google firmly discourages. Using popular keywords can help improve a site’s SEO performance. [Update: Google and most other search engines are no longer believed (Wikipedia link here) to recognise these tags: see Lammo.net post at this link.]

Google search results for “Madeleine McCann + Liverpool” shows that the Post and its sister site, the Liverpool Echo, have top rankings for related Madeleine McCann stories. [Update: but lower rankings when a simple Madeleine McCann search is performed. It's unlikely the addition of the keywords aided the LDP's Google ranking. Google says: "While accurate meta descriptions can improve clickthrough, they won't impact your ranking within search results."]

A Trinity Mirror spokesman said: “The metadata was inserted some time ago when the Madeleine McCann story was at its height and was the most-searched item on our web sites. It was inserted to make it easier for our users to access a huge story of national and local interest. The fact that it wasn’t removed is an oversight, which has now been put right.”

The evidence (before Liverpool Daily Post corrected the error this week):

A story about Len Williams, a well-known waterfront manager who recently died.

The section of the site which used these keywords for all stories:

Google’s  definition:

“‘Keyword stuffing’ refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google’s search results. Filling pages with keywords results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site’s ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.

“To fix this problem, review your site for misused keywords. Typically, these will be lists or paragraphs of keywords, often randomly repeated. Check carefully, because keywords can often be in the form of hidden text, or they can be hidden in title tags or alt attributes.

“Once you’ve made your changes and are confident that your site no longer violates our guidelines, submit your site for reconsideration.”

A definition by Nathan Campbell on SEO.com:

“Some unethical SEOs choose to employ renegade tactics such as keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is overloading the content or meta tags of the web page with every possible keyword or phrase that relates to the site in many different forms.”

• Guardian was wrong to buy Madeleine McCann keywords on Google
• Express and Daily Star newspapers’ online apology to Madeleine McCann’s parents – comments turned off
• CounterValue: Sun buys Natasha Richardson as sponsored link
• Geotagged journalism: behind Trinity Mirror’s news maps
• BBC Two Daily Politics – Greenslade and Meyer on regulation

Alison Gow gives the back story on deputy business editor of the Liverpool Post and Echo, Tony McDonough, who was caught in the crossfire at a Liverpool pub last weekend.

McDonough tweeted after it had happened and during his hospital visit.

Why?

“People are hardwired to want to share stories; at times of crisis we all want to tell someone (…) Journalists want to get news out too, and they want to get it out fast and first to as wide an audience as possible,” writes Gow.

Full post at this link…

• Liverpool Daily Post: Company bans local journalist’s blog
• Liverpool Post and Echo take part in Lennon bed-in recreation
• #FollowJourn: @alisongow/executive digital editor
• Geotagged journalism: behind Trinity Mirror’s news maps
• #FollowJourn: @kmatt/head of web and data

Mick Ricket, National Union of Journalists (NUJ) Merseyside branch chairman, has asked for an inquiry by the Competition Commission into regional newspaper ownership in the UK.

• Media release: NUJ wants Scottish government inquiry into future of media
• Bristol branch of NUJ to protest over Evening Post cuts
• BECTU calls on members to take action over BSkyB takeover bid
• NCTJ to launch new competition to find ‘Stars of the Future’
• NUJ Release: Union urges MPs to help journalists refuse unethical work

A day that saw plenty of job cut announcements. Here’s the roundup for this evening and Journalism.co.uk will update tomorrow.

• Trinity Mirror: 78 jobs to go as reported at Press Gazette and Hold the Front Page. Press Gazette reported that a restructure will see journalists divided into four centralised multimedia divisions:

“The publisher has today entered into a consultation period with staff and said it envisaged 59 editorial jobs would be cut. It said it was committed to voluntary redundancies where possible.

“The bulk of the job losses will come in Liverpool, where the 175-strong editorial team will be cut to 132 and the Liverpool Daily Post will scrap its Saturday edition.”

• The Telegraph: 50 jobs editorial jobs cut: Fifty editorial staff are to lose their jobs at Telegraph Media Group, management told staff today.

“It is understood the cuts represent a 13-14 per cent saving to the editorial budget and will be brought into effect by Christmas at the latest,” reports MediaGuardian.

• Possibility of more redundancies at the Guardian; GNM losing £100,000 a day
• MediaWeek to go online-only; 18 Brand Media editorial jobs cut
• Round-up of the recent UK newspaper job cuts
• Goodbye Press Gazette: round-up of the links
• Liverpool Daily Post runs online diary to mark capital of culture status

Trinity Mirror has implemented a company-wide pay freeze affecting all staff (that’s journalists and non-journalists employed by the publisher).

Below is the email sent by chief executive Sly Bailey to staff:

Company Announcement

Please follow the link to see the letter being sent today to all staff.
19 November 2008

Dear Colleague

We have all seen the severe impact of the economic downturn reported in the media on a daily basis.  Unfortunately there doesn’t appear to be any sign of an improvement for the foreseeable future and there are indications that it could get worse before it gets better.  What is clear is that the gravity of the challenge facing our business is unlike anything we have seen before.

As a consequence of this economic climate, all parts of Trinity Mirror have seen revenues come under severe pressure as advertisers have significantly reduced their spending.  In addition, our readers are also looking to curtail their spending with a consequential impact on our circulation revenues.

This in turn is affecting our financial performance, and in particular the cash generated by the business.  As previously communicated to you and the financial community, we anticipate that our profits will fall in 2008, with a further decline in 2009. Whilst we expect to remain profitable going forward, the fall in cash generated will adversely impact our ability to comfortably fund ongoing commitments such as interest payments on our borrowings, taxes, investment in our business (capital expenditure) and pension scheme funding.  To partially address the constraints on cash we have already cancelled the share buy back and have halved the 2008 interim dividend paid to shareholders. The final dividend will also be reviewed by the Board in February.

With our revenues considerably reduced, our priority has to be to safeguard the future of the Group.  To do this we have done much already to reduce costs in many ways.  So far this year, sadly, this has involved the announcement of almost 1200 job losses across the Group.  We have also had to announce the closure of 44 of our titles, 40 offices and our print plant in Liverpool. We do want to do all we can to minimise any further job losses.

I can also confirm now that our performance has been such that we will not be paying any bonuses relating to 2008. This goes for me; the Executive Committee and virtually all other managers.

Nevertheless we need to take further steps to protect the future of our businesses.  I have therefore decided not to hold a pay review for anyone in Trinity Mirror during 2009.  This will apply to me, the Board, all management and employees of the Group.

We all hope that the economic climate improves in 2009 and, whether it does or doesn’t, I know we will all perform to the best of our abilities. To recognise this, a special 2009-only incentive scheme will be introduced.

In January, once we have a clearer idea of trading going into 2009, the Board will agree a target for this scheme.  I can tell you that this target will be lower than the target set for profit sharing in previous years.  The scheme is designed so that it could pay up to £1,000 to each employee (before tax) and will apply to all employees across the Group (see note below). Further details of the scheme will be communicated to you in January.

I appreciate that the times we find ourselves in are some of the hardest in living memory.  I ask for your support so that we can manage our way through it and ensure the long term survival of our business.

Yours sincerely

Sly Bailey

Note:

All permanent staff will participate in the bonus scheme with the following exceptions:

Those not in receipt of contractual pay (i.e. casuals, or unauthorised absence).

Staff that have taken part in industrial action during 2009 will not be entitled to any payment.

In respect of starters and leavers:

New starters may participate and will receive payment on a prorate basis for full months’ service during 2009.

Employees who retire or leave under redundancy will receive payment on a pro rata basis for full month’s service during 2009.  This will still only be paid after auditors approval of the final results.

Staff who resign their employment before end February 2010 (the date of the scheme profit calculation) will not be entitled to any payout.

• Trinity Mirror reports 10 per cent drop in advertising revenue
• Guardian: Trinity Mirror and DMGT mulled merger of regional media
• New figures show ad revenue decline slowing at Johnston Press and Trinity Mirror
• Round-up: Reaction to GMG Regionals sale to Trinity Mirror
• Media Guardian: ‘Massive reduction’ in GNM’s loss next year, says chief executive McCall

As of today the Liverpool Echo hits newsstands showcasing a new style. The Trinity Mirror regional title has undergone a major face-lift after consultations with its readership.

In a statement on the paper’s website, editor Ali Machray said the local paper needed to reflect the the city’s current vibe:

“There’s a buzz about Liverpool right now. And there’s a buzz about an Echo that will bring you everything that reflects the amazing resurgence of our city and its people.”

The new look publication will feature brand new education and health sections, a section for women and comprehensive local football content. It will also sport a new design featuring a new masthead and cleaner layout.

Following last week’s launch of The Birmingham Post’s ‘Post Mobile’ service, this week sees Trinity Mirror’s Newcastle Journal and Evening Chronicle follow suit with their own news services for mobile.

Plans are still on course for Trinity to have 13 of publications active on mobile by the end of the year.

• Trinity Mirror Wales site renamed WalesOnline
• New look for Birmingham Post website
• Liverpool Post and Echo take part in Lennon bed-in recreation
• #FollowJourn: @kmatt/head of web and data
• Election 2.0: blogs, video and mobile streaming out in force for local election coverage

The Liverpool regional papers, the Liverpool Daily Post and Echo, continue their comprehensive coverage of the Rhys Jones murder trial using Cover It Live technology, which allows the reporter to feed back detailed information about what is happening in the courtroom.

The liveblog of the Rhys Jones trial is currently on standby, but should be going again at 14.30 today. The Rhys Jones coverage can also be viewed together on one page.

For ease of reading back through, it would be good to have the live court coverage more clearly marked with dates and days of trial in the left hand margin next to the times.

On October 9 the Liverpool Daily Post’s editor, Mark Thomas, asked for feedback, but it seems none has been offered.

It’s an impressive feat, which has been going since October 9, and brings up questions of modern day court reporting: it will be interesting to see if it enters the public panel discussion at this week’s POLIS debate at LSE. They’re debating ‘Respect for Contempt: Keeping Speech Free and Trials Fair’.

With a panel that includes Maxine Mawhinney from BBC News 24 as chair, and contributions from Joshua Rozenburg (Legal Affairs Editor, Daily Telegraph), Jonathan Kotler (US Attorney and USC Annenburg School of Journalism), Mark Haslam (partner, BCL Burton Copeland, and Nick Davies (Guardian, author of Flat Earth News), it should make for an interesting set of much-needed discussions.

• Multimedia local coverage for Ipswich murder trial
• Budget coverage: what to expect
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – TV news presentation
• Election 2.0: blogs, video and mobile streaming out in force for local election coverage
• Journalism 2.0: The pros and cons of liveblogging trials

At last week’s Digital Editors’ Network event in Preston, Trinity Mirror’s new geotagged news maps were a popular topic of conversation.

Launched on the Liverpool Echo and Liverpool Daily Post (LDP) websites, the maps let readers search for news by postcode.

But what information are journalists required to input to make the maps work? and how does this affect their newsgathering?

Alison Gow, deputy editor of the LDP, explained the system to Journalism.co.uk:

“At the moment, every time our reporters create a news story they fill in certain fields which dictate where a story is placed online (e.g. story type, keyword tags, author).

“For stories to appear on the map the reporter simply ensures the new ‘postcode’ field is also completed; they do this by chosing from a vast selection of regional postcodes which are already included in a dropdown menu.”

For stories that could be tagged with multiple postcodes, the primary site of the news, e.g. the accident site in a road crash, is currently being used, though multiple location tagging is being looked into.

“We don’t use them for everything; there would be no point in geotagging Liverpool town hall for every council story, for example. But for location-specific articles they work really well.

“As it grows the map offers greater potential for ‘news from your street’ for readers, and it makes the Post and Echo sites more sticky – people can see markers for stories in their area and this should encourage them to click through and read more,” said Gow.

To develop the project further, the same map format is being looked at for other editorial content, such as business articles, she added.

Any more questions about the journalists involvement with these maps? Leave a comment and hopefully we can get a response.

• Liverpool Daily Post: Company bans local journalist’s blog
• ITN maps news items with Google mash-up
• Are the new police crime maps any use for UK journalists? Some doubts raised
• Headlines and Deadlines: Journalist tweets being shot or why Twitter works
• YouTube videos now available in Google Maps

Nice use of timeline builder Dipity by the Evening Leader: the paper has plotted videos and text reports of UFO sitings in the area onto a timeline, turned it into a widget and embedded it on its website.

What’s extra nice is that the Dipity widget lets readers look at the info as a timeline, map, flipbook or list. Using the third-party service helps the newspaper get extra mileage out of what are no doubt already popular online stories.

The feature has also been made ‘public’ through dipity’s site to help drive traffic back to the Evening Leader.

The tool has previously been used by the Manchester Evening News for its coverage of a proposed congestion charge for the city; and the Liverpool Daily Post to create a 24-hour snapshot of Liverpool as this year’s European Capital of Culture.

• Tool of the week for journalists – Dipity timelines
• More from Dipity: Manchester Evening News plots congestion charge coverage
• Tool of the week for journalists – ProPublica’s TimelineSetter
• Liverpool Daily Post runs online diary to mark capital of culture status
• #ge2010: Digital timeline charts campaigning and media innovation online

The Manchester Evening News has used free online tool Dipity to create an interactive timeline of the paper’s coverage of a proposed congestion charge for Greater Manchester.

The timeline features text and images from key dates in the ongoing story, dating back to January 10 2005.

The information can also be displayed and browsed by text-only, images-only or on a map.

The Liverpool Daily Post recently used the same online tool to create an interactive timeline for its diary of a day in Liverpool.

• Liverpool Daily Post runs online diary to mark capital of culture status
• Tool of the week for journalists – Dipity timelines
• Evening Leader plots UFO sightings with Dipity
• Tool of the week for journalists – ProPublica’s TimelineSetter
• Tool of the week for journalists: Timeline

The Liverpool Daily Post is running an online diary today to mark Liverpool’s status as the 2008 European Capital of Culture.

Using online service Dipity, the Post has created an interactive timeline with contributions from readers and its editorial team to capture ‘a day in the life of Liverpool’.

The pictures and text submitted can be plotted and viewed on an interactive timeline or Google map, or browsed by text and images.

• More from Dipity: Manchester Evening News plots congestion charge coverage
• Liverpool Daily Post runs four-day liveblog
• Tool of the week for journalists – Dipity timelines
• Evening Leader plots UFO sightings with Dipity
• Behind-the-scenes: Reuters’ interactive economic crisis project

The Hub and Spoke laying out may be in vogue for the majority of those adapting to an integrated newsroom but you’d be hard pressed to call Trinity Mirror’s Liverpool nerve centre anything other than an archipelago.

Alison Gow, deputy editor of Liverpool Daily Post, gave Journalism.co.uk a quick tour and explained how a partially rather than fully integrated newsroom for Liverpool’s Daily Post and Echo newspapers and a portfolio of weeklies served them best.

Similar to other large cities in the UK, Liverpool’s morning paper, the Liverpool Daily Post (typically 15,000 copies circulated per day) and the evening Echo (109,000) serve vastly different markets. To account for this the newsroom has integrated but also demarked areas where each paper’s interest is best served by not mixing processes.

The newsdesks of the Post & Echo had previously been fully integrated but the unsuccessful experiment lasted only 18 months and end in 2001, as it didn’t fully serve the needs each paper had and met with opposition from staff who were resistant to working on the other title.

“I suspect the industry is a lot more broad-minded now as we work across print, internet, TV and radio,” Gow told Journalism.co.uk.

COPY

The dailies and weekly newspapers have adapted and refined a partially integrated newsroom where the two main papers share news copy, but keep diary and features separate.

“A government minister in town would tend to be interviewed by a Post reporter,” Gow told Journalism.co.uk. “That copy would be sent by the Post newsdesk to the Echo newsdesk to be rewritten and subbed down. Echo page leads are around 350, Post 600 plus.

“The Post & Echo share a court reporter but the very distinct target audiences of both papers means what makes a splash in the Echo, gangster trials for example, may struggle to make a page lead in the Post.

“Inquests would be covered by one reporter whose copy would be shared between both papers.

“An exception would be Liverpool council meetings – mostly covered by the council reporters from both papers as it’s a contact-building exercise as much as anything.”

The Echo can also publish stories from the weeklies the day the papers are published, Gow added, as the assistant news editor has access to their content queues.

“It’s a co-operative system and involves the newsdesks, picturedesk and multimedia desks talking to each other. That’s why the command desk is so important,” added Gow.

STAFF

At the centre of the archipelago – the big island – is the command desk where Post and Echo news editors and their deputies sit along with a picture editor who works across both publications and the Echo design editor.

Reporters are title specific, as are the features and sports teams, and both papers have separate features and sports editors and deputy editors, Arts editors and motoring editors.

A multimedia head, working across both titles, also sits on the command desk. As on the web, Gow says, the two publications have ‘more fluid identities’.

Each department desks now has embedded digital journalist. Under the old system ‘they just used to sit in the corner away from everyone else’ said Gow. Now they espouse the need for web content and ensure the website remains an area of focus for each department on each title now that they break 99 per cent of their stories online.

Video is a separate entity altogether – one video journalist is responsible for managing libraries, cutting pieces and training newsroom staff and reporters in video-journalism.

She has trained eight other staff so far, giving them a week’s hands-on training so that they can manage handicams and cut footage. They aim for a new web video each day.

SUBBING

A pool of eight subs work across the Echo, the England and Welsh Daily Posts, Huddersfield Examiner, the Chester Chronicle, the Merseyside and North Wales weekly papers on a rota basis.

There are also title-specific staff who work primarily for each paper – ‘champions’ of each brand, adds Gow.

This approach has shifted subs from thinking they work for a single publication, she said, to a ‘hive-mind’ where they work across several titles.

• Liverpool Daily Post: Company bans local journalist’s blog
• #FollowJourn: @alisongow/executive digital editor
• New look for Birmingham Post website
• Liverpool Post and Echo take part in Lennon bed-in recreation
• #FollowJourn: @kmatt/head of web and data