Author Archives: Oliver Luft

About Oliver Luft

Oliver Luft was news editor of Journalism.co.uk from 2006-8.

Audio: Regional newspapers compete with football clubs online

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Leading English football clubs are in competition as web publishers with local and regional newspapers.

Footballing giants, like Manchester United or Liverpool Football Club, have huge online and TV publishing arms which they use as revenue streams and to control the flow of news coming from the club.

But it’s not just the big clubs that have got in on the act.

Journalism.co.uk spoke to William Watt, digital sports reporter with the Lancashire Evening Post, about how he sees the changing landscape of online news now that smaller football clubs, like his local club Preston North End, are publishing their own stories on the web.

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For the club hitting a good balance with the local media is the key.

“It’s a tricky job trying to be both press officer and web publisher,” Matt Morris, Preston North End’s media manager, told Journalism.co.uk.

“It throws up a conflict of interest at times as there are elements of competition between the club and the press.”

While there is an onus to feed good stories to the clubs website, he added, the club still needed to be promoted locally as it was in competition with several other local clubs for revenue, that necessitated having a good working relationship with the media and striking a balance between the needs of the club as an online publisher and feeding the local media.

Huff Post launches interactive map of US campaign funding

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The Huffington Post has launched a mash-up feature that details all contributions made to the US presidential campaigns on an interactive map.

The FundRace feature visually details how US cities, neighbourhoods and blocks are donating to different campaigns.

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It uses a searchable mash-up of data from Federal Election Commission on a Google Map, allowing users to search for the names, addresses and amounts pledged by all campaign contributors.

The tool allows users to take a birds-eye view of campaign funding or to drill down to specific neighbourhoods.

It follows a growing tradition of US news and opinion sites making use of freely available public information by taking raw data and displaying it visually on interactive maps. Chicagocrime.org was the first exponent of this visual approach to news when it started putting crime data on maps. It was quickly copied across the nation.

The trend has even spread across the Atlantic, although the impact in the UK will be more limited because the majority of public information is, somewhat perversely, not easily accessible by the public and has to be applied for under the Freedom of Information Act.

In addition to just mapping donations, the new Huffington Post feature also offers a widget for Facebook and a big donor feature highlighting which of the great and good of American life are stumping up cash for the campaigns.

Image of Fundrace donors

Getlippy TV- latest online video service from Hearst Digital

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Hearst Digital has launched an online TV service – Getlippy TV. No great surprises that yet another TV service has been launched with the heavy burden of “entertainment news, funnies, plus behind-the-scenes footage from a sister mag”.

They will also be taking videos from readers – prepare to be dazzled…

Yahoo: US papers grew online audience 6 per cent last year

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According to data released by Newspaper Association of America and compiled by Nielsen Online, the online readership of US newspapers grew about 6 per cent last year.

Online reach of newspapers grew to 38 per cent of all active online users, up from 36 percent in 2006.

Newspapers had an average of 60 million unique US visitors per month in 2007, up from 56.4 million the year before.

Birmingham Mail looking at developing community-based sites

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In addition to the launch of a new website, The Birmingham Mail is looking at developing and hosting a series of community-based education websites.

In interview with Journalism.co.uk, editor Steve Dyson said the newspaper was looking at a range of options for local community sites.

One of the options, he said, was to host sites for local educational institutions, where students would write the content.

“What we are planning further down the line is local community websites, again hosted by the Birmingham Mail, but they may well be sites in their own right,” he told Journalism.co.uk.

“We are looking at a variety of community sites, mainly around schools and media courses in schools, where they have asked if they can fill a local community website for us.

“We are talking to educational groups about it. There are about 15 schools around Birmingham that are developing media courses and as part of the courses they have to have websites which have to be updated daily by students. What we are talking to them about is hosting it for them.”

Dyson stressed that these sites were very much in the early planning stage but were being considered along the same lines as the series of community sites launched last year by the Teesside Gazette, another Trinity Mirror paper.