The Daily Mirror today unveils a new-look website, at mirror.co.uk

Before: how the site looked last week

Mirror Online publisher Matt Kelly says in an introductory post that the “cleaner and less cluttered” design will make better use of photography and video.

Content is organised into seven sections: News, Sport, 3am, Lifestyle, Money, Play and Opinion. Comments are encouraged on stories, and sharing articles has been made easier.

Kelly said:

We constantly improve our website and as much as we believe the new look Mirror Online is a big step forward, we know there’ll be things we haven’t got completely right.

PaidContent has a video interview with Matt Kelly and Mirror managing director Chris Ellis:

• Media release: Chris Ellis appointed MD of digital for Trinity Mirror nationals
• Greenslade: Mirror.co.uk on metrics and building loyal online audiences
• AOP: Mirror digital director Matt Kelly and the 800lb gorilla in the room
• Media release: Mirror launching personalised web content
• Podcast: Google meets online news publishers at the Frontline Club

Roy Greenslade reports on Daily Mirror associate editor Matt Kelly’s presentation at this week’s World Editors Forum conference in Prague.

Much has already been made of Mirror.co.uk’s decisions to launch separate sites for its main traffic drivers (Mirrorfootball.co.uk and 3am.co.uk) -  in particular the sites’ attitude towards search engine optimisation (or lack of it).

Speaking at the industry event, Kelly challenged the metrics used to measure web traffic:

“According to Kelly, ‘users’ (a sterile description) are people who discover content through Google, devour it, and then return to their search engine to look for more elsewhere,” writes Greenslade.

As a result users car less about the sites they visit and advertisers are less willing to spend cash to attract them, Kelly added.

“Until we bite the bullet and forget about this mad race for users, and focus instead on building engaged, loyal audiences, we will continue to see the value of our content erode online,” said Kelly, who added that slow growth of engaged audiences should be the aim for news groups online.

Full post at this link…

• OJR: Using Google Trends to fine-tune your news website
• Mirror.co.uk unveils new ‘cleaner’ look
• Publishers’ vertical search can rival Google, says AOP forum
• ‘Good for advertisers, bad for media companies’: Google has a sit-down with news publishers
• Reporters to get author pages with Google’s new authorship markup

Yesterday afternoon in a powerful Guardian exclusive, investigative journalist Nick Davies reported that the Murdoch News Group papers paid £1m to ‘gag’ phone-hacking victims.

Rupert Murdoch, who owns News Group, recently argued he had little influence on his publications’ editorial content; it would be interesting to see how his other UK papers would treat the story about their sister title today.

Let’s see how each of the UK news websites is running the story [as around 9.30 - 10 am]. [News organisations owned by Murdoch are labelled (M).]

Note: Observations correct at time of writing; subject to updates.

• The BBC has headlined many of its bulletins across radio and TV with the story. Channel 4 ran with the story yesterday. Both news sites feature the story as the main article. Sky News (M) ran it last night and its main (breaking) story on its website is “Cameron: ‘Coulson’s Job Is Safe’”.

• Guardian: Top story with several supplementary features and stories

• Telegraph.co.uk: ‘Newspaper embroiled in alleged £1 million cover-up of phone tapping’ – front page

• TimesOnline (M): Run ‘Cameron told to dump aide over tapping claims’ – in ‘more news section’ on front page

• Financial Times: ‘Murdoch reporters accused over phone hacking’ – front page of main site

• Independent.co.uk: ‘Cameron aide faces phone hacking row’ – front page of main site

• Wall Street Journal Europe online: ‘British Tabloids Face Scrutiny By Government on Privacy Issues’ – front page

• Mirror.co.uk: ‘Tabloid bosses face phone taps quiz’ – Latest news section

• Daily Mail: In news headline section – ‘Prescott calls for police probe into claims journalists bugged his phone‘

• DailyStar.co.uk: Rupert’s £1m bill

• Express.co.uk: ‘News Group’s ’1M Phone Tap Payouts’ – front page

• Sun.co.uk (M): Not running the story

• NewsoftheWorld.co.uk (M): Not running the story

The Murdoch empire (source: BBC website / News Corp)

NEWS CORP BUSINESSES

Australasia:
Daily Telegraph
Fiji Times
Gold Coast Bulletin
Herald Sun
Newsphotos
Newspix
Newstext
NT News
Post-Courier
Sunday Herald Sun
Sunday Mail
Sunday Tasmanian
Sunday Territorian
Sunday Times
The Advertiser
The Australian
The Courier-Mail
The Mercury
The Sunday Mail
The Sunday Telegraph
Weekly Times

• New Guardian.co.uk homepage adds multimedia and flexible storytelling to design
• Wired: New York print war is really about digital future
• ‘The silence is almost eerie’: press holds back on phone hacking scandal
• British Press Award winners 2009
• New York Magazine: Weigh-in for New York Times and Wall Street Journal

Interesting to see that Malcolm Coles’ recent blog post, which highlighted newspapers’ terms and conditions forbidding linking from their websites, has resulted in some action – outlined in the comments below the post.

Ian Douglas, head of digital production at Telegraph.co.uk says:

“Thanks for pointing this out. As you saw, we deleted it as soon as we heard about it. I’m afraid it say more about the relevance of Ts and Cs than the various papers’ attitude to linking.”

David Black, group director of digital publishing at Trinity Mirror, writes:

“Malcolm, Thanks for spotting this – it’s being fixed for Mirror.co.uk.”

Malcolm Coles has now followed up with another post – what other sites have these kinds of T&Cs banning links to their site? Full post at this link.

• Malcolm Coles: ‘The eight stages of linking-out denial’
• New appointment: Ayers is made regional web publishing director at Trinity Mirror Regionals
• Media release: Chris Ellis appointed MD of digital for Trinity Mirror nationals
• Producer responds to Guardian TV review: ‘If an opera is reviewed, you get someone who knows about opera’
• NUJ Release: NUJ condemns more job cuts at Trinity Mirror regionals

A look at where the news has unfolded. Please post additional links below. Journalism.co.uk will add in more links as they are spotted.

Washington-based blogger and social media expert, Gaurav Mishra talks to Journalism.co.uk in an interview published on the main page.

One of the few on-the-ground user-generated content examples, Vinu’s Flickr stream (screen grab above). Slide show below:

How it has been reported:

• NDTV looks at the way it unfolded on the net and promotes its own forums. “Citizens of the World Wide Web have connected to terror-stricken Mumbai in a way never seen before,” it reports. One eyewitness, Dinesh Kumar, used a forum on NDTV.com to share his experiences as he tried to make his way back home from work, the article says.
• The Wikipedia current event page is almost filling role of a blog or news service, with its extremely quick updates.
  

Photography:

• Flickr users such as Vinu, have uploaded pictures from the scene (images: all rights reserved).
• A Flickr search such as this one, brings up images from Mumbai, although many are reproduced from a few sources. People have also taken pictures of the television news coverage.
• But before you re-publish your finds beware: an advanced search which filters pictures by copyright and only shows up images opened up under Creative Commons, limits the results.

Blogs:

• Bloggers, such as Gaurav Mishra are tracking it live, and point out useful links. He has also collected together relevant Tweets.
• Other blogs to look out for: Rediff.com; Mumbai.metblogs.com. More to come.
• List of blogs, probably from outside, but outside Mumbai: Blogada roundup here.
• On the ground blogs: Amit Varma’s India Uncut; Sonia Faleiro; Arun Shanbhag

Breaking news:

• The BBC has a good stream of breaking news, with most recent at top; likewise, the Guardian’s is here.
• Away from mainstream media, NowPublic are charting it here and Ground Report here.

Social Media:

• Facebook doesn’t seem to have that much activity as yet and is not that helpful for finding news, although members of Mumbai related groups are posting comments on the walls.
• Update (27/11/08): New Facebook groups formed:‘In memory of all those who died in the 26th-27th november MUMBAI massacre’; ’26 November 2008 – Terrorist Attacks on Mumbai’.

Microblogging:

• This Roomatic page brings together Twitter updates in chatroom format: makes it very easy to follow and updates quicked than you can read.
• Lloyd Shepherd blogged that Mumbai ‘tweets’ appear to have been restrained, seemingly by the Indian authorities. (update: however, seems quite unlikely… Anyone know if any truth in this?) Check out Amy Gahran’s post here, which raises some good points about the danger of Twitter rumours…
• The Twitter stream can be followed here: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=mumbai
• Gaurav Mishra writes, “so far, micro-blogging service Twitter seems to be the best source for real time citizen news on the Mumbai terrorist attacks, and “Mumbai” & “#Mumbai” are both on Twitter trending topics now.”
• Summed up here, at Wired.com.

Mapping:

• NYTimes.com has linked photos to the attack sites on its interactive map.
• The Guardian does a nice job here. Click on the cameras to see what took place.

Video:

• The Google video seach is here. YouTube videos are mainly limited to broadcast footage, with one user even filming the TV reports, for those without access to live television coverage. YouTube videos seem to be all second-hand broadcasts from mainstream media.

Timelines:

• Mirror.co.uk (Mumbai November 26-7) and Guardian (for past terrorist attacks in India). BBC timeline here (complete with contentious Twitter quote).

• Dipity timeline here:

Campaigns / Aid:

• In the same vein as Tsunami Help started in 2004/5, MumbaiHelp has been launched, with lists of the dead/injured here: http://tr.im/1kg3 http://tr.im/1kg2 /  http://tr.im/1kg1 / http://tr.im/1kg0 / http://tr.im/1kfz

• Mumbai bloggers interviewed – video collection
• #FollowJourn: @Gauravonomics/social media specialist
• Mumbai and Twitter: how the BBC dealt with Tweets and accuracy
• Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum – how to follow the event
• Flickr and geotagging: Part of the newsgathering model?

The newsreader Selina Scott claims she was ditched by Channel 5 because she is too old, and is fighting for up to £1 million in compensation.

• News of the World on phone hacking: ‘What happened to them should not have happened’
• MediaGuardian: Former Al Jazeera executive loses discrimination case
• YouTube publishes footage from Life in a Day project
• Jon Snow receives degree 40 years after expulsion
• BBC News audience up by a quarter on last year

Not wanting to be left out following a new look for The Sun’s homepage last Friday, a Telegraph.co.uk redesign and the last stage of the Guardian’s site revamp, Mirror.co.uk began its relaunch on Monday.

Starting with changes to the homepage, the rest of the site will follow suit and new features will be introduced in the coming weeks, an announcement on the site said.

On the homepage a most read/most emailed/highest rated articles box has been added and the left-hand navigation bar done away with. Links to Mirror.co.uk subscription services are neatly lined up across the top of the homepage.

Elsewhere the site’s video player has been upgraded (though the ‘see more videos’ tab opens up another window still), more picture galleries added and the blogs section overhauled with some new additions.

So how does this first stage of redevelopment compare with its competitor’s new looks?

It’s certainly colourful with the addition of multicoloured section headings and if you navigate better with images than this is for you – though personally I find the block of images that dominate the ‘above the fold’ area a tad too busy.

More embedded video, which seems to be happening across the article pages, is a plus, as is the vastly improved ‘below the fold’ on the homepage, which has been tidied up no end.

• News of the World launches website redesign in beta
• Behind the scenes: Telegraph.co.uk’s redesign
• Telegraph.co.uk redesign: engagement above traffic?
• Accessibility 2.0: The Sun and The Times
• Haymarket revamps audio-visual industry site AVinteractive

Mirror Group Newspapers digital head Paul Hood wants to add a ‘personalised and localised’ service to the revamp and development of the news Mirror.co.uk site.

Hood revealed details of his digital strategy to NMA. The plan to catch up with rival tabloid newspapers, like the Mail and the Sun, who have shot away in the race of online popularity, is to use the national newspaper site as “a starting point for web usage”.

• NMA: Mirror drops mobile site to help major rebuild
• Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk
• Malcolm Coles: How US traffic is vital for UK newspaper sites
• Brand Republic: Mirror to merge print and online ad sales teams
• New appointment: Ayers is made regional web publishing director at Trinity Mirror Regionals