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:

• MSN Local: Searching for stories in local data
• Yudu to launch online shop for magazine e-editions
• Smart Moves: Adrian Blomfield moves to the Telegraph

Ed’s picks:

• Jonathan Warren: Climate Camp, the Guardian and cit-j photos
• Adam Westbrook: 6×6 audio for freelance journalists
• Mediating Conflict: Twitter, journalists and hype
• YouTube Biz Blog: YouTube extends advertising partnerships to individuals
• 10,000 Words: ‘How Twitter saved my journalism career’
• Poynter Online: Building a brand as a journalist online
• Birmingham Post News Blog: ‘Why the Post must go weekly’
• Darlington Councillor: Council newspapers and a ‘one-eyed’ local press

Tip of the day:

• Training tips on iTunes

#FollowJourn:

• @Pixelsmith/news editor

On the Editors’ Blog:

• Tewspaper – the ‘online newspaper with no writers’
• Dominic Mohan named editor of the Sun

• Journalism Daily: Sub-editing for online, new role for Heat editor and more on MPs’ expenses
• Journalism Daily: FT.com’s innovations, plinth reporter plans a party and the need for media blackouts
• 10,000 Words: It helps to remember the ‘person’ in ‘personal branding’
• Journalism Daily: Guardian Q&A, Wired Journalists’ new look, Google News re-indexing
• Journalism Daily: BBC video plans, Trinity Midlands strike and perfecting the press release

A new online newspaper venture, Tewspaper, has been launched with automatic aggregation replacing the need for journalists. The sites use an algorithm to search and aggregate news from social media sites to create websites relevant to five US cities (though the site itself claims to cover 10), according to a press release.

The service uses publicly available APIs to find text updates and match images to stories for Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles and New York City.

“We began by limiting the news to trusted authorities on Twitter. From there, we are working on an algorithm that can find additional breaking news from anyone on Twitter and other websites as it happens,” said Jared Lamb, the creator of Tewspaper, in the release.

The sites currently look pretty basic, but add an RSS feed and this could be a handy tool for journalists in these areas wanting to track news in real-time.

There’s also an attempt at a Digg-style user-rating system, perhaps similar to plans for the blogpaper, though this isn’t yet explained on the site.

Full post at this link…

• RSS feeds for search results at The Sun
• Daily Sentinel: How to use Twitter to break news from the field
• LGEO Research: Where do local authorities fit in the hyperlocal media landscape?
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – manage your site’s feed to social sites
• Breaking news from mobile to Twitter/Seesmic – perfect example of how it works

Journalism Online, the recently launched project aimed at creating online pay walls/subscription packages for newspaper and magazine publishers, says it expects 10 per cent of internet news readers will pay for content.

The organisation has set an average of $25 a month, or $300 annually, as the figure it believes consumers are willing to pay for ‘professionally produced stories on the web’, based on research.

If it reaches this target the new venture would generate significant income for newspaper and magazine partners, the AP reports.

“Journalism Online thinks it can help by serving up a smorgasbord of online newspaper and magazine content that enables readers to pay a single vendor for coverage pulled from multiple Web sites. The subscription packages, for instance, might cater to Web surfers willing to pay for the best stories about entertainment, business or even something even more specialized like California politics,” the AP states.

Full story at this link…

• Johnston Press: Dismantled paywalls are part of year of ‘discovery’
• The new news subscription system from Journalism Online: what the web says
• DigitalSpy: Sky launches an online-only subscription TV service
• New Media Age: Mail Online launches paid-for mobile app
• Independent: Ten years of FT’s metered pay model

The UK-based Mail Online was forced to shut down one of its online polls yesterday after a concerted campaign by Twitter users and, Journalism.co.uk can reveal, UK-based psychologists, nearly brought their servers to a halt with an overwhelming ‘yes’ vote.

The poll, which asked the somewhat leading question “Should the NHS allow gipsies to jump the queue”, attracted ridicule from many within the Twitter community leading to, at one point a 96% vote in favour of the proposition.

Brighton-based senior lecturer in experimental psychology Dr Sam Hutton contacted Journalism.co.uk today to reveal that there was also an email campaign among UK-based psychologists who, as part of their jobs, take questionnaire neutrality seriously.

“One reason I think there were so many yes votes was because a psychologist got hold of it, and sent an email which quickly got copied to virtually every psychologist in the country, suggesting that we all vote yes as a way of protesting against such a ludicrously loaded question (psychologists care about questionnaire design),” Dr Hutton said.

“It clearly worked – it was actually 96% YES when I looked, but the server was struggling, and they have removed the poll completely now. A nice example of an online newspaper getting it wrong…”

This is the email that Dr Hutton, and psychologists all over the UK, received:

Here is an excellent example of how to phrase a neutral question from our friends at the Daily Mail… for all those interested in questionnaire design:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/polls/poll.html?pollId=1011506

Please do vote “yes”

Angered Twitter users have now vowed to take their campaign to all of the Daily Mail’s online polls, taking the opposite stance to the expected response, given the Mail’s reputation for having a ‘Middle England’  readership and an editorial line against what it sees as the liberal establishment.

Footnote: Readers from outside the UK might be also interested to read about the Mail’s history – in the 1930s it openly backed the British Union of Fascists, aka the Blackshirts.

• Daily Mail gypsy/NHS poll on The Now Show
• Poll: Is the new Daily Mail beta website an improvement?
• Journalism.co.uk forum poll: Who do you want to edit the NUJ’s Journalist magazine?
• Daily Mail was ‘late online’ admits chief exec, as new site moves out of beta
• Daily Mail tries to lure users with free international texts

As reported on Journalism.co.uk Neil Thurman and Merja Myllylahti’s study into online-only newspapers has suggested that going online alone is unlikely to bring an ailing newspaper title back into profitability.

Focusing their research on Finnish financial news site Taloussanomat, which folded its print edition in December 2007 after 10 years of publication), the pair found the title had suffered a drop in unique users of 22 per cent in five months of being online-only.

A week’s newsroom observation, access to web traffic stats and financial information, and interviews with journalists at Taloussanomat give context to the statistics and a deeper insight into the psychological and cultural barriers still at work in the title’s transitional newsroom.

Thurman and Myllylhati in their research article have been careful to point out that their predictions for the wider news industry and online-only newspapers stem from specific examples, so I think it’s important to put our report on their findings into the same context with the information below.

Firstly, the stats on traffic changes after the paper went online only – what size was its web and print audiences previously?

• Between 2001-2006 its daily print circulation fell from 88,000 to 72,000; over the same period it recorded a 1,180 per cent rise in weekly ‘visitors’ to its website;
• It is the second most popular (in terms of traffic) financial news site in Finland;
• The site posted an initial rise in visitors after going online-only and sustained this growth for five months until June 2008 when weekly visitor numbers began to fall (from 292,059 in June to 185,714 in July)
• By October 2008 (10 months after closing the print edition) the site is recording page impression figures 97 per cent higher than the week before it went online-only;
• But, as the research points out, neither the page impressions figure nor the number of weekly visitors has performed better than a title with a print counterpart.

Challenges in the newsroom

Metrics

• Metrics, central to this study, have become increasingly important within Taloussanomat’s newsroom and work practices, according to the research;
• Journalists are increasingly aware of how individual stories ‘perform’;
• There is an added pressure to this: advertisers, who would previously spend with a title based on its performance as a whole, will now look to the performance of individual articles or site sections;
• “The fact that we need high visitor numbers on the site is part of being an online newspaper, but it has an impact on the journalistic work. The positive side of it is that we know what stories people find interesting. The negative aspect is that the journalists also know that,” Hannu Sokala, editor for development and strategy, told the study;
• Increasing awareness of metrics may also be driving a more consumer/populist news agenda on the site according to some journalists interviewed.

Working patterns:

• Despite supporting the amount of space to fill and experiment with online, journalists at Taloussanomat were found to sticking to traditional print work patterns e.g. filling at 5pm, keeping stories the same length as in print, not innovating with use of multimedia;
• Journalists were also largely deskbound within the newsroom – a result of cut resources and also a desire to ‘feed’ the website with more frequent updates and content;
• Yet, the researchers also noted a reluctance amongst journalists to file breaking news in short-form ways, because they view it as ‘incomplete’;
• A higher frequency of online stories had also increased the newsroom’s reliance on agency copy.

The study concludes:

“The online-only newspaper should be freer to exploit the potential of the online medium without the burden of legacy content from a print or broadcast parent. The reality this study found is that the online-only newspaper carries other burdens – financial and logistical – that counteract its advantages. The cumulative effect means killing the print edition does not immediately transform a title’s ability to produce interactive, nonlinear, multimedia content. Nor does it mean that staff are ready or willing to service new publishing platforms or readers’ expectations for multiple daily updates.”

It’s early days – Taloussanomat is one of the first titles to have ditched its print edition to go online-only. According to the study, the fact that unique users decreased folowing the switch shows ‘just how much the medium, rather than the content it carries, determines how news is consumed’.

Yet, as Juha-Pekka Raeste, editor-in-chief and CEO, remarks in the research, practices such as the increased ‘churning’ of copy are not a long-term solution. Instead Taloussanomat needs to focus on niche content and coverage, he adds.

It is clear Taloussanomat and other online new entrepreneurs have ideas about how editorial content can be adapt successfully to online – but can the necessary staff resources and revenues need to fund this be adapted in the same way?

• Political magazine Seven returns to online roots
• Mashable: Online overtakes print as main news source
• Has ditching print edition damaged Post-Intelligencer’s web traffic?
• FT Group’s digital subscriptions rise by 50 per cent
• Econsultancy: Survey – how journalists use social media

It started off bleakly, but the talk got more positive as the participants warmed up. These are four digital leaders, driving forward ambitious online projects in their respective countries:

• Eric Echikson, Google’s senior manager for communications in Brussels

• Katharina Borchert, chief editor of the online newspaper DerWesten.de and also the managing director of WAZ NewMedia

• Pierre Haski, president of the society and editor-in-chief of the online French newspaper, Rue89

• Turi Munthe, CEO of the citizen journalism site Demotix

In a discussion led by Richard Gizbert, the panel discussed their hopes for opportunism in a dire economic climate.

Starting with a gloomy video reminder of the demise of the Rocky Mountain News, the panel were then probed on their own thoughts and experiences.

Katharina Borchert, from WAZ media, said the last 3-5 years have been a real opportunity, despite the fact they’re currently laying off a third of their staff.

To be using user-generated content in the way they are would have been unthinkable three years ago, she said.

Web is no longer an add-on, she said. There’s ‘more freedom to create content for the web’.

Video is the most popular content on their site, she added.

Pierre Haski, who left his job at Liberation newspaper to set up the independent French newspaper, realised the opportunity for different types of conversations with readers.

“Through blogging you reconnect with your readers. We tried to develop a model of participative news website, where readers could contribute to news process,” he explained.

After failing to sell the idea to Liberation, he and other colleagues left to launch Rue89.

“Not only will we survive the crisis but we will make money next year,” he said.

Then, Munthe, who set up his agency Demotix in a bid to source citizen journalism from around the world to counter what he perceived as a lack of original foreign news content.

“The flip side of the doom and gloom there are all sorts of opportunities out there,” he said.

He’s not worried about the content control, as editing happens within the process. “Who figured out three columns of smoke was wrong? Bloggers. That’s exactly what Demotix is trying to replicate.”

Demotix tries to bring together collaborative voices to self-correct stories and content, Munthe explained.

• How Demotix’s contributors have covered Iran election protests
• ‘Meta-reading’: the generational differences in consuming news
• Pro-am journalism site Demotix gets facelift
• New Rue89 venture for Canada goes live
• Telegraph.co.uk blogs: Citizen journalism matters

An online newspaper for users of Twitter, has been set up by a former chief sub-editor of the Scottish Sun, allmediascotland reports.

“I was of the view that it would be good to bring out an online Twitter newspaper where people can message me their news and we publish the best,” explained its founder, James McIvor, former chief sub-editor of the Scottish Sun, who also runs the Scooped! online service.

Full story at this link…

• A wee exit roll call for Scottish journalists
• AllMediaScotland: Glasgow local paper closes after 14 years
• allmediascotland.com: Kachingle delays launch because of ‘overwhelming response’
• allmediascotland: New business magazine launched in Scotland
• AllMediaScotland: MPs release ‘Crisis in the Scottish Press’ report

This post has backfired a little: the original idea was to look at how the national broadsheets reported the ABCes because it’s always interesting when a publication or website has to report on itself – on its good or bad performance.

Here’s how the Guardian did it today:

That obsession [Team GB] most obviously helped the Guardian, which took advantage of the Beijing effect. That meant that guardian.co.uk remained the UK’s biggest online newspaper for August, attracting 23.11 million global unique users last month, a 46% increase from August 2007 and up 12% on July this year. The Guardian added 2.5 million unique users last month and still has the largest number of UK-based online readers: 8.77 million or 38% of its total audience.

And on the day itself like this.

And Telegraph.co.uk?

It looks like they didn’t.

Times Online?

It appears not.

Independent.co.uk?

Nope.

FT.com

No.

Please correct us if we’re wrong.

Looks like there was only one national newspaper who gave the August stats so much online space. But you could read about the ABCes at Brand Republic, Press Gazette, NMA and here at Journalism.co.uk. Or find the data for yourself here.

• ABCes: Independent.co.uk records biggest increase in daily browsers
• How the Guardian and Telegraph overtook the Mail in latest ABCe traffic report
• Media Guardian: 15m UK users visted newspaper, claims ComScore
• Twitter tops BBC for monthly traffic, while BBC Online click-throughs exceed 10m
• Paywall results in for Newsday as US newspapers see dip in traffic

A court in Kuala Lumpur has ordered the editor of Malaysian online newspaper Malaysia Today to reveal the identity of commenters, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has reported.

Editor Raja Petra Kamarudin has also been told to remove three articles after libel proceedings were brought against him by lawyer Datuk Muhammad Shafee Abdullah.

Abdullah is suing the editor over the articles and comments, which claimed he was responsible for ‘trumped up charges’ in a recent lawsuit against a politician in the country.

RSF has condemned the court order and has called for its withdrawal.

“The court order is invalid as it is only effective in Malaysia and Malaysia Today is hosted on a server in the United States. This should be taken up with a US court,” the organisation said.

• Short-skirted woman sues newspaper commenter
• Guardian: Police have more than 100 phone-hacking recordings
• Brand Republic: Defamation charges against Wikipedia dropped
• Papua New Guineans now suing for $45m in Jared Diamond/New Yorker case
• #ozleak: Australian journalist live tweets newspaper’s legal battle

Hot on the heels of last week’s Knight News Challenge winners, two foundations have released details of journalism projects to receive funding.

New Voices – a project from the University of Maryland’s interactive journalism institute – has awarded funding of $17,000 each to 10 citizen media start-ups.

The recipients include: Cool State Online, a Californian project to set up micro bureaux covering news from the Asian and Latino communities; The Appalachian Independent, an online newspaper for the rural community in Maryland; and Family Life Behind Bars, a site where the families of prisoners can share information and experiences.

The progress of the winners (listed in full in a press release) can be viewed on the New Voices website.

Meanwhile, University of Central Lancashire journalism lecturer Andy Dickinson is to receive funding from journalism lab Sandbox for a project mapping the movements of local reporters in their communities.

Reporters from print, radio and TV would be equipped with GPS devices to monitor their movements on a normal working day, explains Dickinson in a blog post.

“The project would then attempt to develop a matrix that visually demonstrated when and where the news agendas of local communities and those of professional media organizations coincide, with a view to examining the range of elements that lead to this juxtaposition.

 

Conducted in this way the research can explore ‘randomness’, and ‘proximity’ to breaking news as a value that impacts news agendas (and says something about reseources too).”

Congratulations to Andy – we’re already looking forward to the results.

• New Voices journalism grant winners for 2009 announced
• UCLan project awarded £64,000 from Google to support ‘news entrepreneurs’
• Lostremote.com: NBC to integrate tweets from top Twitterers
• #gv2010: Follow the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit 2010
• Blogging for a cause leads to first prize for Global Voices in Zemanta competition

Today is the 15th birthday of the World Wide Web, marked by the CERN announcement on April 30 1993 that the web would be free to all.

It’s a cue to sit back and marvel at how much has changed in a relatively small amount of time and post screen shots that may induce the same feeling as mum fetching the baby photos.

After the WWW age was born, online news and journalism was swift to follow: The Tech – an online version of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology newspaper, went live in May 1993; closely followed by the first journalism site from the University of Florida that October.

By 1994 there were already more than 20 online newspaper and journalism services. The Sunday Times and the Daily Telegraph were the first British papers to enter the online world in 1994 with the Beeb taking slightly longer to catch up, launching its news website in 1997.

1999 saw the launch of Journalism.co.uk in its first form and my haven’t we grown…

With web technology advancing daily, the slick news sites of today will surely be drawing fond smiles in another 15 years.

Happy birthday Web, here’s to many more…

• NYTimes: Slate replacing ‘Today’s Papers’ with the ‘Slatest’
• Radio 4′s Today programme on Metro’s 10th birthday
• Happy Birthday BBC News website
• Looking at the Liverpool papers live blog coverage of the Rhys Jones murder trial
• BBC could share more technology with S4C/Trinity Mirror in Wales, says Trust chairman

Kristine Lowe is a freelance journalist who writes on the media industry for number of US, UK and Norwegian publications. Today Online Journalism Scandinavia looks again at news sites linking to blogs.

Dagbladet.no, the online operation of Norway’s second biggest tabloid, has become the latest Scandinavian news site to use Twingly to show blog links to articles on the site.

Dagladet.no has been experimenting with Twingly since October last year, but last week announced that Twingly would now become the standard across the site.

However, the online newspaper said that articles dealing with very sensitive issues – those concerning murder, suicide and death – would not not have the technology applied to them.

“Our experiences with Twingly so far are very positive. There are so many interesting things happening in the blogosphere, and we think it is important that our readers can converse in their own rooms and extend the debate about our articles there,” Mina Hauge Naerland, a journalist involved with the implementation, told Journalism.co.uk.

“It’s also very interesting for us to be able to follow those conversations, it helps us improve our journalism.”

Politiken.dk, the news site of one of Denmark’s leading newspapers, started using Twingly a month ago, and the online operations of two of Sweden’s most influential newspapers, Svenska Dagbladet and Dagens Nyheter, have used Twingly for about a year.

• Online Journalism Scandinavia: VG.no adds blog trackbacks to articles with Twingly
• Late Night Marketing: How one newspaper lost 5,000 incoming links
• Online Journalism Scandinavia: Here come the Web 2.0 docusoaps
• Twingly: Testing social media’s love of traditional news
• Bild reaches out to blogosphere with Twingly

Interesting post over at Media Culpa asking if Swedish daily Aftonbladet’s biggest threat is now Facebook rather than Expressen, its next nearest newspaper rival online.

(I have had to rely on Media Cupla as the source, rather than the original post Mindpark, as I don’t speak Swedish – so apologies for linking to a post about a post)

Henrik Torstenssons draws out a second point to note. Henrik points to another story (again in Swedish – same problem, so I can’t confirm this is the case, although have faith in Henrik) in which Kalle Jungkvist, editor-in-chief of Aftonbladet, said his paper ran a focus group with people in their twenties, who told him the choice for young Swedes was either Aftonbladet or Facebook for their idle surfing time.

How long before Facebook is getting newspaper execs in the UK worried?

• WikiLeaks director to write column for Swedish tabloid
• csmonitor.com: Israeli officials seek Swedish government condemnation of organ theft story
• Aftonbladet to offer readers social network style profiles
• WAN 2008: Web TV Q&A with Kalle Jungkvist, editor-in-chief Aftonbladet.se
• Aftonbladet rolls out social network for readers