Appearing before the joint committee on privacy and injunctions yesterday, Martin Clarke, the publisher of Daily Mail website Mail Online, shared some interesting comments on digital media, in reference to privacy, regulation and general approaches to journalism in a digital world.

The latest results from the Audit Bureau of Circulation (published in December) showed the Mail Online continued its lead ahead of other audited UK news sites with almost 85 million unique browsers in November.

So here is a collection of thoughts shared by Clarke before the committee on issues relating to the impact of the internet on the news industry:

Privacy:

If we were publishing really unpleasant, intrusive stuff our readers wouldn’t like it. One of the beauties of the internet is the feedback you get from your readers is pretty much instant in two ways.

First of all, you can see in real time who’s reading what stories on your homepage … that immediately tells me which ones they’re interested in.

Secondly, we have the comments facility and readers aren’t slow to let us know when they think we’ve been unfair or unpleasant. Quite often I’ve changed tack on a story, or the headline on a story or dropped a picture because of things readers have left in comments. That’s the beauty of the internet, the interaction between you and your readers is that much more immediate. If there were no privacy law no I don’t think it would make that much difference.

Regulation

You are dealing with an industry that faces big commercial challenges going forward. Digital is how newspapers are going to have to make their living, the economics of the internet are such you probably have to make big chunk of that living abroad. Any further regulation might compromise that, and then quite frankly we won’t really have an industry left to regulate.

… You think of the internet in chunks, press, bloggers, tweeters, but from the consumers point of view that’s not how they consider it. It’s an endless continuous spectrum that starts with what their friends are saying on their Facebook pages, what some tweeter might be saying, to a story they link to in a tweet, then go back on to Facebook page and comment … Pretty soon all those commenting systems are going to be bolted together. Where do you draw the line, where do you say right this bit of the internet is going to be regulated and this bit isn’t?

… We’ve had to wake up and deal, embrace a new reality … The internet is a great way to distribute news, it means newspapers are now back in the business of breaking news … alongside TV and radio and the people who had taken that privilege away from us. It’s gratifying as a journalist to be part of that. Equally it’s brought some negatives …. You can’t turn back the tide, we can’t say stop the internet world we want to get off.

On content:

The reason it’s different from the Daily Mail is because it’s a different market … I’m operating in a digital market where we do get feedback from the readers, I can see in real time what they’re really reading rather than what I might think as journalist they should be reading. In the digital world if you don’t listen to your users, if you don’t involve them, if you don’t listen to their tastes, than you’re dead. We don’t follow that data slavishly, that’s where I come in, it’s my job to mediate the light and the shade. So that’s why it’s different from the Mail.

Equally we do more showbiz…we do vastly more science, we do more political commentary, we do more foreign news because we’re not limited by physical space … It goes back to the point I made right at the beginning, if you’re going for scale you can’t just fit in a niche. You can’t say “we’ll be in the red-top end, or the middle-market or the broadsheet end”. Niches aren’t big enough on the internet to survive, so you have to be a much broader church.

You can watch the session in full on Parliament TV and hear from others who appeared before the committee, including Edward Roussel, digital editor of the Telegraph Media Group and Phillip Webster, editor of Times Online.Similar Posts:

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After taking a look at the top 10 Facebook news stories of 2011 yesterday, today we are publishing a list of the year’s top Twitter stories.

This list is based on data from SEO and social data tool Searchmetrics.

A liveblog makes it in at number two, plus there are photo stories and a news game (see number four).

1. Independent: Why the Fukushima disaster is worse than Chernobyl = 83,529

2. BBC: LIVE: Osama Bin Laden dead = 77,853

3. Mail Online: The big pictures: The moment Japan’s cataclysmic tsunami engulfed a nation =  74,835

4. BBC: The world at seven billion = 73,783

5. BBC: Apple holding more cash than USA = 70,202

6. Guardian: Top 100 women = 48,250

7. BBC: Malawi row over whether new law bans farting = 38,861

8. Mail: Back from the dead: Astonishing pictures show how Japan is recovering just three months after tsunami = 31,750

9. BBC: Spelling mistakes ‘cost millions’ in lost online sales = 28,253

10. BBC: Sacrebleu! = 27,377

Data was gathered using Searchmetrics and downloaded for analysis on 6 December. The news outlets included were: BBC, Guardian, Telegraph, Independent, Mail Online, the Sun, the Mirror. You can see the downloaded Twitter data here.Similar Posts:

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Facebook last week published a list of the most shared articles on Facebook in 2011. That list included only US publishers – so we decided to create a list of the most shared, liked and commented articles from UK news outlets.

This list is based on data from SEO and social data tool Searchmetrics.

As with the US list, stories range from hard news to quirky (or “cute”, as Facebook describes them). Interestingly, the two top stories are newsgames, where the reader is invited to participate using gaming mechanics. (It’s worth mentioning here that there will be a session on newsgames and gaming mechanics at our news:rewired conference for journalists, for which the agenda is here.) The list also includes online video (another news:rewired topic).

The top 10 most shared, commented and liked Facebook news articles of 2011:

1. BBC: The world at 7 billion = 339,149 (shares, comments and likes)

2. Guardian: Charlie Sheen v Muammar Gaddafi: whose line is it anyway? = 219,023

3. Mail Online: Amy Winehouse, 27, found dead at her London flat after suspected ‘drug overdose’ = 190,498

4. BBC: Austrian driver allowed ‘pastafarian’ headgear photo = 167,754

5. BBC: Japan earthquake: Tsunami hits north-east = 159,023

6. BBC: Breast milk ice cream goes on sale in Covent Garden = 149,509

7. BBC: Osama Bin Laden, al-Qaeda leader, dead – Barack Obama = 146,244

8. BBC: Drunk Swedish elk found in apple tree near Gothenburg = 146,182

9. Mail Online: Robber who broke into hair salon is beaten by its black-belt owner and kept as a sex slave for three days… fed only Viagra = 145,413

10. BBC: London rioters: ‘Showing the rich we do what we want’ = 131,839

Top 10 most shared news articles on Facebook in 2011

1. BBC: The world at 7 billion = 147,000

2. Guardian: Charlie Sheen v Muammar Gaddafi: whose line is it anyway? = 65,820

3. BBC: Japan earthquake: Tsunami hits north-east = 60,238

4. BBC: Austrian driver allowed ‘pastafarian’ headgear photo = 54,800

5. BBC: Drunk Swedish elk found in apple tree near Gothenburg = 44,700

6. BBC: Osama Bin Laden, al-Qaeda leader, dead – Barack Obama = 38,891

7. BBC: Speed-of-light results under scrutiny at Cern = 36,700

8. BBC: London rioters: ‘Showing the rich we do what we want’ = 36,500

9. Mail Online: Meet the blind Great Dane in need of a home (but you’ll need to make space for HER huge guide dog) = 34,600

10. BBC: Amy Winehouse: Tributes paid to dead singer = 31,400

Top 10 most ‘liked’ articles on Facebook

1. BBC: The world at 7 billion = 75,619

2. Mail Online: The 9/11 rescue dogs: Portraits of the last surviving animals who scoured Ground Zero one decade on = 62,458

3. BBC: Austrian driver allowed ‘pastafarian’ headgear photo = 61,306

4. BBC: Drunk Swedish elk found in apple tree near Gothenburg = 51,618

5. BBC: Osama Bin Laden, al-Qaeda leader, dead – Barack Obama = 49,882

6. BBC: The world at 7 billion = 47,449

7. Mail Online – Beauty in every grain: For the first time remarkable photographs reveal hidden charms of ordinary SAND = 43,760

8. Mail Online: Robber who broke into hair salon is beaten by its black-belt owner and kept as a sex slave for three days… fed only Viagra = 42799

9. Mail Online: Cheeky monkey! Macaque borrows photographer’s camera to take hilarious self-portraits

10. The Sun: Frankie Cocozza 
kicked off X Factor

Top 10 most commented news articles on Facebook in 2011

1. Mail Online: Amy Winehouse, 27, found dead at her London flat after suspected ‘drug overdose’ = 127,396

2. BBC: The world at 7 billion = 116,530

3. BBC: Breast milk ice cream goes on sale in Covent Garden = 108,258

4. Guardian: Charlie Sheen v Muammar Gaddafi: whose line is it anyway? = 105,754

5. BBC: London rioters: ‘Showing the rich we do what we want’ = 73,350

6. BBC: Amy Winehouse: Tributes paid to dead singer = 72,313

7. Mail Online: Robber who broke into hair salon is beaten by its black-belt owner and kept as a sex slave for three days… fed only Viagra = 71,514

8. BBC: Japan earthquake: Tsunami hits north-east = 68,830

9. Independent: US preacher warns end of the world is nigh: 21 May, around 6pm, to be precise = 67,388

10. BBC: Speed-of-light results under scrutiny at Cern = 59,824

Data was gathered using Searchmetrics and downloaded for analysis on 6 December. The news outlets included were: BBC, Guardian, Telegraph, Independent, Mail Online, the Sun, the Mirror. You can see the downloaded Facebook data here.Similar Posts:

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This Mail Online article was the most shared, the Searchmetrics study found

Fifteen times more links to Mail Online articles are shared worldwide via StumbleUpon than on Twitter, according to a study by Searchmetrics.

During the six month period analysed, just over half (50.78 per cent) of links to Mail Online articles were shared on StumbleUpon, with Facebook activity (likes, shares and comments) accounting for 45.87 per cent and links on Twitter just 3.21 per cent.

More than half (56.77 per cent) of the Guardian’s social links came from Facebook, with StumbleUpon accounting for 31.35 per cent and Twitter 10.98 per cent, according to the study.

In a release, Dr Horst Joepen, CEO of Searchmetrics said:

Some people we have shown this data to have been surprised at the volume of links generated for UK newspapers on the StumbleUpon social bookmarking site. This is a very popular site globally and the links could have been generated throughout the world from English speakers who use StumbleUpon.

The most frequently shared content on the Mail Online was said to be an article (with images) about the earthquake in Japan which had been shared 392,521 times on the monitored social sites. The Guardian’s most frequently shared content was reportedly a humorous quiz discussing quotes from Muammar Gaddafi and Charlie Sheen.

The Mail Online’s top three most frequently shared articles:

1. The big pictures: The moment Japan’s cataclysmic tsunami engulfed a nation = 392,521 links

2. Amy Winehouse, 27, found dead at her London flat after suspected ‘drug overdose’  = 253,561 links

3. Robber who broke into hair salon is beaten by its black-belt owner and kept as a sex slave for three days… fed only Viagra =

252,650 links

The Guardian’s top three most frequently shared articles:

1. Charlie Sheen v Muammar Gaddafi: whose line is it anyway? = 363,938 links

2. Detroit in ruins = 210,468 links

3. Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media = 187,987 links

The Mail Online and the Guardian are the most visible UK newspaper websites on social networks such as Facebook, StumbleUpon and Twitter, according to a separate 10-week study by Searchmetrics, which analysed how often content from 12 leading newspaper sites was shared on six popular social networking and bookmarking sites.

Mail Online came out on top, with links to its pages being shared 2,908,779 times a week on average. The Guardian came second with an average 2,587,258 links being shared on social sites every week.

The Searchmetrics study monitored links shared on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Delicious and Google+ over a period of 10 weeks.

Average social links per week of UK newspaper websites

• Mail Online  = 2,908,779 links/week
• Guardian= 2,587,258 links/week
• Telegraph = 879,783 links/week
• Independent = 617,148 links/week
• The Sun = 195,311 links/week
• FT = 83,382 links/week
• Daily Record  = 82,151 links/week
• Mirror = 54,881 links/week
• Herald Scotland = 13,063 links/week
• Express = 9,600 links/week
• Daily Star  = 702 links/week
• The Times = 256 links/week

Seachmetrics’ CEO Joepen added:

Social news – that is news and articles that are shared or recommended by your friends and followers on social sites – is potentially an important source of traffic for online news sites.

It’s worth noting that search engines, such as Google and Bing are starting to include popularity on social networks as a factor when judging the quality of web pages and how they should be ranked in search listings. So it’s important for news and other web sites to build and monitor visibility on social sites if they want to rank highly and attract visitors via search.

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Tabloid Watch has brought to our attention an apology, “buried in the US section” of Mail Online. The site links to two other apologies, also posted in that section.

Statements contained in an article published on 7 March, headed “Babies who are born at 23 weeks should be left to die, says NHS chief”, were wrongly attributed to Dr Daphne Austin, who is a medical consultant specialist employed by the NHS.

They were made in a programme in which Dr Austin participated and were published by us in good faith. In particular, Dr Austin did not state that babies should be “left to die” and did not express the opinion that the financial aspects of neonatal care were the issue. We apologise to Dr Austin for the errors.

The post by Tabloid Watch is at this link

The Mail’s apology is at this linkSimilar Posts:

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Daily Mail website Mail Online took home the digital innovation award at last night’s Press Awards, much to the dismay of some. Is it innovative? Or just successful? Does it matter?

Media Briefing editor Patrick Smith stands firmly behind the award, and explains some of the reasons in an interesting post on the Media Briefing blog.

Soap stars on the beach isn’t Pulitzer prize-winning stuff, but the content from the paper is in the middle of the front page and you can click on that if you want too. There is genuine news here: the bank worker fired a Facebook post comparing here £7-an-hour wage to a boss’s £4,000-an-hour, for example, plus lots of middle market news mainstays you would expect such as tax and immigration. Mail execs reportedly claim only a quarter of traffic is driven by “showbiz” stories.

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paidContent UK is reporting that the Mail Online is due to launch on the iPad next week. According to the article, Mail Online publisher A&N Media aims to grow digital to represent a quarter of its revenue by 2016 “by adding a range of new subscription options and tilting away from advertising alone”.

A&N won’t get there by wedding itself to paid content, however. “We’ve not adopted any ideological beliefs in terms of paid versus free and remain open,” [A&N CEO Kevin] Beatty said. “Mail Online newspapers’ iPad edition is released next week … with our iPad edition, we’ll be trialling both paid and free models.”

The publisher has previously said the Mail Online website will remain free whilst it pitches its growing audience scale to advertisers.

According to the latest figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations, Mail Online has almost 51 million monthly unique visitors, (February 2011). The latest results represented the site’s first month-on-month fall in traffic for more than a year, after reaching just over 56 million in the slightly longer month of January.Similar Posts:

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Associated Newspapers is to open an office in New York to house journalists for Mail Online.

According to Crain’s New York Business, the news group has signed a four-year lease and will move in next month.

Mail Online receives 65 per cent of its traffic from outside the UK – 35 million unique users in December out of a total of 53.9 million, according to ABCe.

Full report on Crains New York at this link.

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Mail Online has become the latest UK newspaper site to launch an iPhone app. But the title is offering six-monthly or annual subscription packages, at £4.99 and £8.99 respectively, rather than a 30-day or monthly model.

Mail Online MD James Bromley said the title’s mobile strategy would hinge on developing paid apps as an additional revenue stream.

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Daily Mail managers might need to invest in some social media lessons for their journalists. If  you haven’t already noted the paper’s impressive Twitter fail, in its research for a misguided article about the iPhone 4, read this.

Mashable also has an account; read it here.

The Daily Mail reported this morning than an iPhone 4 recall is underway, but don’t believe it; the UK publication’s source was a tweet from a fake Steve Jobs Twitter account. Apple hasn’t announced any plans to recall its new phone.

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Publisher of the Mail Online, the Daily Mail & General Trust (DMGT), has shared some of its executives’ slide show presentations from an investor day.

The presentations explain on why the online paper is staying free, and not going down the the Times Online route.

You can download the slides here, or find paidContent:UK’s excellent summary at this link. The group says that while charging for niche and mobile might work:

MailOnline – uniquely among UK newspaper sites – is now big enough to make the advertising model pay.

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#followjourn: Sarah Ewing

Who? Ewing is a freelance journalist based in Edinburgh

Where? She has her own blog, The Scribbler, where she posts up “new case study requests for features I’m working on and thoughts on current issues”. Her articles for various different publications are collected on her Journalisted page. Ewing works mostly for Mail Online and the Daily Telegraph, covering health, celebrity, relationships among other things. She has also contributed to the Times, and frequently run into trouble with her luggage while travelling.

Contact? @sarahewing

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.Similar Posts:

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Mail Online is coming under renewed criticism for its use of online images, following a story on ‘moneyfacing’ (people using banknotes to create self-portraits).

A tweet from @alisongow alerted us to the Mail’s article ‘Creasing up: Banking on a funny photo with the ‘moneyfacing’ craze sweeping the web’ on which commenters have alleged the paper has used the images central to the story without permission.

Comments include:

“As the photographs are a pretty intrinsic part of this so called feature, I’d say that asking permission to use them is the very least this so-called newspaper should’ve done.”

The creator of the images, Thom Shannon, has now reposted them to Flickr with a watermark protecting them, adding he has never felt the need to use watermarks before, but that requests to the Daily Mail to remove the photos have not been answered.

The Mail isn’t the only site making use of the images: the Sun has a 12-image slideshow and Telegraph.co.uk features just one image, though it does give accreditation for this to a website (something Shannon has disputed).

This is not the first time the Mail’s use of online images has been challenged, but issues of copyright aside, Kevin Anderson suggests that there is a bigger opportunity being missed by newspapers at large (scroll down to the comments):

“[T]his is another example of the news industry missing an opportunity to build community around what they do. When I use Creative Commons photos from sites like Flickr, firstly, I honour the terms of the licence. Secondly, I drop the Flickr user a note letting them know that I’ve used a photo on our site. It’s not only a way to use nice photos, but it’s also a way to build goodwill to what we’re doing and do a little soft touch promotion of our coverage. It takes a minutes out of my day to create that email, but instead of a backlash, I often get a thank you. They let their friends know that the Guardian has used their picture. It’s brilliant for everyone. There are benefits to being good neighbours online, rather than viewing the internet as a vast repository of free content.”

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The introduction of a rating system for comments on articles on the Daily Mail’s website back in December last year was a bold move for a site that often publishes highly controversial (or certainly comment-provoking) articles.

Comments on the site can be removed by the editorial team if necessary, but the aim of the system is that users will act as moderators, flagging up inappropriate content.

One particular story last weekend tested its mettle: the report on the death of a man in the back of a lorry in the channel tunnel.

The article in question provoked a spate of offensive and abusive comments (as shown in this screengrab captured by FiveChineseCrackers.com).

As Mail Watch points out in a post on the matter: “If these are the highest rated, and thus most visible, comments, how does that reflect upon the ‘controls’ and ‘processes’ used by Mail Online to prevent ‘inappropriate content’ appearing?”

By Monday afternoon the comments referred to had been removed from the piece. At time of writing this blog post, only two comments appeared on the article and additional comments are no longer being accepted:

As Mail Online’s terms and conditions page states, the site is not liable for third party content including comments posted by users.

And the site’s own House Rules suggest that pre-moderation of comments is not always the case:

“Reader comments that violate the letter or spirit of these rules or our Terms may be removed (or, if checked in advance, not published in the first place). If we do remove something, we will generally remove whole posts, or where necessary, whole threads (not parts). This means that even if only one sentence is objectionable, the whole comment will usually be removed (or not published).”

In this case, however, the screengrab clearly states above the offensive comments: “The comments below have been moderated in advance.”

Asking how such incidents affect the Mail’s attitude to commenting, a spokesman told Journalism.co.uk:

“As regards the Channel Tunnel story, several inappropriate comments were posted until they were rightly flagged up through the ‘report abuse’ facility when we immediately took them down. This shows our system is working as it was designed.

“The comments facility is a much-loved part of Mail Online and phenomenally popular.

“To enable as many people as possible to have their say the vast majority of our comments are now not moderated in advance. This presents a new challenge for us and our readers but we are happy the system is working well.”

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This post originally appeared on Malcolm Coles’ blog at this link.

June 2009 saw the Mail Online unexpectedly overtake both the Guardian and Telegraph in the ABCes with the most monthly unique users partly on the back of US traffic and Michael Jackson stories, a position it held for both July and August.

Fast forward to September and the story is the same as earlier in the year – Guardian 1st, Telegraph 2nd and Mail 3rd. So what changed from June to September? To find out, I’ve compared the ABCe figures for UK and foreign visitors in June and September. The difference between the Guardian’s performance and that of the Telegraph and Mail is revealing.

Analysis: The Guardian has seen significant growth in the UK AND abroad.

Table: September unique visitors (millions) and percentage change since June

The Guardian’s total visitor numbers grew 14 per cent from June to September (up from 29m to 33m). There was a 17 per cent increase in UK visitors and a 12 per cent increase in visitors from abroad. This makes it the most popular online newspaper in the UK by some way (it’s 2.4m ahead of the Mail in second place).

UK visitors accounted for 36 per cent of the total in September (barely changed from 35 per cent in June).

Analysis: Telegraph sees growth overseas

Table: September unique visitors, percentage change since June

The Telegraph has also seen a 14 per cent increase in total visitors from June (27.2m) to September (31m).

However, the geographical breakdown is revealing – its UK unique visitor numbers are down one per cent from June to August but its overseas visitors are up 22 per cent (from 18m to 21.9m). It’s now the most visited UK newspaper abroad – but only the 3rd most visited inside the UK.

As a result, the proportion of its visitors that comes from the UK has fallen from 34 per cent to 29 per cent – the lowest of any UK newspaper (the Mail held this honour back in June).

The Telegraph saw the biggest increase in overseas visitors of any newspaper – but because its UK traffic fell, the Guardian beat it into 2nd place.

Analaysis: Mail Online records UK growth only

Table: September unique visitors, percentage change since June

The Mail’s traffic stood fairly still between June and September – it had 30m visitors last month, up just two per cent on three months ago. But its story is the reverse of the Telegraph’s.

The Mail saw strong UK growth – up 14 per cent to 9.5m visitors in three months. Overseas visitors, however, fell by 2 per cent to 20.6m. As a result, it now gets 32 per cent of its visitors from the UK (up from 28 per cent in June).

And the rest …

As for the others:

• The Sun is down to 23m visitors in September, an 8 per cent fall over 3 months. A 15 per cent collapse in overseas visitors couldn’t make up for a 3 per cent increase in UK users.
• The Times is a story of decline – 13 per cent down overall, with a 10 per cent fall in the UK and a 14 per cent fall from overseas.
• The same is true of the Mirror Group (down 5 per cent overall) and the Independent (down 6 per cent overall) but to a lesser extent.

This table has all the stats. If you can’t see the iframe, you can see the full spreadsheet here.

The Express doesn’t take part in the ABCes. The FT does not participate every month.

Journalism.co.uk ABCes coverage at this link…Similar Posts:

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