Author Archives: Oliver Luft

About Oliver Luft

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

Gawker to pay bloggers based on page views they generate

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Valleywag has a good couple of pieces about Gawker supreme Nick Denton’s decision to pay staff on his leading blogs according to how many page views their posts register.

Gawker writers will be paid a set monthly fee with additional payments:

According to Valleywag a memo sent to staff said:

“Each site will be assigned a pageview rate. At the end of the month, if the money you earn in pageviews exceeds your monthly base pay, you will be paid the extra money as a bonus.”

The scheme already runs on Wonkette, Gizmodo and Defamer. A salary of $2,000 per month on a page view rate of $5 would need to generate north of 400,000 page views each month to begin earning bonus.

Benazir Bhutto assassination: the citizen and pro photojournalist takes

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Mindy McAdams has highlighted some interesting pieces of photojournalism documenting the tragic events of last week when Benazir Bhutto was murdered after speaking at an election rally in Rawalpindi.

Two pieces of work of the same event effectively sum up the citizen vs pro debate.

The BBC has footage that it claimed shows the assassin firing shots into the back of Bhutto’s head before blowing himself up (effectively debunking the Pakistani authorities’ line that she broke her neck while trying to take cover and evade the bullets).

As you’d expect it’s grainy, wobbly footage, but that’s not so important as it’s the event rather the quality of the craft that’s makes this compelling.

Compare that with the professional slideshow put together for the New York Times by the Getty photographer John Moore who was covering the event.

He gives a spoken first person account as his pictures show the rally, the brutal attack from further back in the crowd and the shocking fallout.

Look at the video images from the amateur and the powerful stills from the pro, then if you can think of a better more succinct example of how citizen journalism and the work of pro-snappers complement one another, I’d love to hear about it.

God, no? Is it list and predictions time already?

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Yes, it’s that time again, the season of favourites lists, bests of, highlights of 2007, and rough guesses of what may happen in the coming 12 months.

I’ve brought together the few lists I have managed to find in between crazed bouts of gorging my way through East Sussex’s entire supply of mince pies and crapulent afternoons spent selecting the wine for the Christmas party (finally decided on Blue Nun – half bottles).

For what it’s worth, my predictions for the next 12 months are a pocket-sized Second Life for the Asian market, Google car insurance and marriage counselling by April and some kind of Granny app for Facebook so you can check on the vital signs of elderly relatives.

Citizen journalist videos through op-ed pages of NYTimes.com

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Later this week videos created by citizen journalists that look at issues surrounding the upcoming presidential primaries, in the US, will be available alongside professional work through the op-ed pages of NYTimes.com, according to Beet.tv.

Talking to Beet, Cynthina Farrar, producer with Purplestates.tv (and Yale researcher scholar), explained how non-professional reporters working with her new company put together nearly a dozen pieces for the Times.

(Video of her interview in the news section.)

Purplestates.tv is also running the videos through Facebook and will build applications for its videos to run through Open Social, Farrar added.

What’s the Drudge Report worth?

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How do you put a value on something so closely aligned with an individual, which really has very little to it?

The Drudge Report would be worth next to nothing without Matt Drudge. If you wanted to buy the site you’d pretty much have to by him too.

Once you’ve got over that little hump, how would you even begin to put a value on it? Before you even got to how much you should pay for it, first you’d have to make an assessment of what you’d be paying for.

Portfolio has looked at several different ways to value the business and come to a series of valuations, which basically reflect the malaise that is valuing online publishing businesses.

It assessed Drudge in terms of eyeballs on the page – comparing it with a value paid for Slate in 2004 of roughly $4 per visitor – and come up with a $5.3M price tag. It also reached a valuation based on potential advertising revenue and concluded that this could be between $9.6M to $14.4M in relation to a supposed 60 million monthly pageviews.

The third valuation was based on a supposed figure Drudge himself might call for. Portfolio says:

“Drudge’s advertising agency recently claimed that the site enjoys 360 million monthly pageviews and 10 million unique visitors a month. That might lead Drudge to conclude that the site is worth anywhere from $40 million (using unique visitors) to $86.4 million (using ad revenue from pageviews).”

The bottom line figure, that which Portfolio thinks you might get it for had you the money and you could convince him to keep his nose to grindstone, $10M to $20M – then only if he’s prepared to sell.

Innovative journalism/technology development projects in the US and UK

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This post is Journalism.co.uk’s contribution to the Carnival of Journalism, which is being hosted by Scribblesheet.

So much has happened in the last 12-months in the online news area we thought it was about time to focus a little attention on some of the projects and processes looking to drive the next step of innovative ways of getting news to the public.

Quite simply, we just want to draw attention to two development projects – one either side of the Atlantic – which aim to meld journalism and technology and find new and unique ways of engaging an audience.

It’s no surprise that both these projects are being run by – or in conjunction with – forward thinking academic institutions.

The UK project is, appropriately enough, called Meld. It’s being run this week by UCLAN department of journalism, under the watchful eye of fellow contributor to the Carnival Andy Dickinson.

Teams of of journalists, creative technologists/interaction designers volunteered to be brought together for a week of hot-housing ideas which would then be pitched to industry partners – Sky News, Johnston Press (JP) and Haymarket Media.

Each partner set a slightly different brief for the teams:

Sky News wants to ‘grow its unique users and page impressions (especially unique users) by offering a variety of original news related content’.

JP wants to ‘enhance our relationship with our readers and expand the local audience for our range of news and data websites.

While Haymarket wanted a rich media offering to serve a traveling baby boomer audience, something that appealed to a new men’s market or a Web 3.0 offering to blend ‘source and social’.

Based on these briefs, the industry bods provide feedback on the ideas – IP developed at the workshop is owned by the teams, each of which would be expected to negotiate their own terms should any commercial relationship develop with the industry partners.

The project is about pure innovation, trying to develop great ideas that benefit the industry and consumer, not innovation cosseted by the sometimes limiting effect of industry-led development where cost worries often cut innovation and failure of a single idea can be seen as failure of innovation, per se.

This snippet of Matt Marsh (taken from the Meld Blog) sums up the spirit of innovative thinking bursting over at the project.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKxGbbGEO7c]

The second project is similar, it’s a project being run as part of the graduate programme at CUNY, this time under the eye of Jeff Jarvis (Jeff has already documented part of the process).

Students on the first wave of the entrepreneurial journalism course spent last week pitching their ideas to a dozen jurors drawn from New York’s stellar media community.

A five minute pitch followed by seven minutes of questions from the jurors offered the chance to walk away with as much as $45,000 seed much for an innovative journalism project.

The course was set up with a $100,000, two-year grant from the McCormick Tribune Foundation.

The students developed projects including a hyper-local site for a Brooklyn neighbourhood, innovative uses of Ning to create specialist social networks, blog search engines using Google’s custom search technology and several project – personal finance for young people, a service to match school athletes with colleges – that questioned weather they could survive just for Facebook (Judge Saul Hansell has posted a fairly full piece about the nature of the individual projects).

A few project were awarded grants from the jurors to develop their ideas further, notably a project to get the public angle on what follow up stories reporters should follow.

The overriding importance of this and the Meld project is that it gives the opportunity to develop left-field ideas which get inside the mind of those that would benefit by using it, rather than just owning it.

These ideas aren’t just providing the next cash cows for big media, they are writing a new language for journalism, creating new platforms for the principles of good practice to be carried forward into this new century.

That is both novel and revolutionary.

New BBC homepage

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For those who have not yet sneaked a peek, this is the beta version of the new BBC homepage (thanks to Richard Titus on the BBC Internet blog for the tip).

bbc home page

The new page allows you to personalise and localise what you want to see. Most of your regular and favourite stuff from can be brought to the page so it’s easy to get at.

The little widgets that all the content sits in are also moveable and adaptable, you can set the number and type of stories – for example – that you want to see in each news and blog section.

It also has a nifty little clock and a whopping great ad left top (as always) promoting Auntie’s latest big thing.

But you can’t import feeds from elsewhere into the page, all the content on display has to be BBC content rather than your favourite stuff from other sites and blogs. NYTimes.com’s personalisation feature remains tops in this regard (If only they could add a web mail widget, then we’d be laughing). Rekuperatoriaus filtrų keitimas https://cleanfilter.lt

The new Beeb page seems very much about making its content more accessible, rather than making the page a necessary ‘one-stop destination’.

Richard Titus is acting head of user experience and design at the BBC, he wrote about the new page:

“From a conceptual point of view, the widgetization adopted by Facebook, iGoogle and netvibes weighed strongly on our initial thinking.

“We wanted to build the foundation and DNA of the new site in line with the ongoing trend and evolution of the Internet towards dynamically generated and syndicable content through technologies like RSS, atom and xml.

“This trend essentially abstracts the content from its presentation and distribution, atomizing content into a feed-based universe. Browsers, devices, etc therefore become lenses through which this content can be collected, tailored and consumed by the audience.

“This concept formed one of the most important underlying design and strategic elements of the new homepage. The approach has the added benefit of making content more accessible, usable, and more efficient to modify for consumption across a wider array of networks and devices.”

The Scotsman’s new website – will it be the destination Scotland needs?

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Last week we were treated to a brief glimpse of screen grabs of the new version of Scotman.com.

Present version:

Old Scotsman

New beta version:

New Beta Scotsman

It’s worth a look again now that it’s nearing the end of its beta development phase and especially as it is now sending email out to its subscribers about its improvements, changes and impending launch.

The redesign has placed greater emphasis on multimedia – more video upfront although not much more than that- and expanded the level of navigation from the homepage by increasing the number of tabs across the top.

The paper has also introduced a most popular stories feature to the revamp.

The left side of the page is now ad-heavy with the great number of links directly below that as eyeballs seem to be endlessly attracted to the left side of web pages.

There are also significantly more links on the page, yet is seems less cluttered as the site has adopted a wider format.

The front-page video opens in a pop up box, rather than playing in the page. Often an annoyance to users and not conducive to viewing, as test at the BBC found out.

On the news pages the comments system seems to have disappeared from the bottom of news stories, replaced by a series of book marking tools that allows the user to easily share through Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Reddit and Stumble Upon.

The new site will ask all users to register before they are able to leave comments on this and other JP sites.

Registering will also open up a user’s ability to personalise their home page (so the site blurb claims).

However, none of that functionality seems to exist on the site yet, most likely because it’s still in the beta phase.

The Scotsman has also added enhanced site search where none was immediately apparent previously. The search offer up a tabbed selection of results of news, web and blog results – promising you’d think.

But all the blogs currently listed are from Johnston Press’s own Blogstoday.co.uk platform, which can best be described as clunky and limited.

Web search returns a series of what looks like sponsored ads, no links to stories, when generic terms like ‘football’ are used. The term ‘Rangers’ again brings up adds for eBay, Ask and credit cards.

My name as a phrase “Oliver Luft” brought no results, a final search for “Kenny Miller” brings an odd set of websites as results, very few weighed in favour of the Scottish international footballer, as you’d perhaps expect.

Again, these may be just teething problems ahead of the full launch (although other JP sites seem to run the same search system with similar results).

If all the missing and frankly odd elements are just teething problems then why show it off to the readership at this stage?

For a newly redeveloped site, it seems a little old fashioned. The level of interactivity on offer and how the site sits with the broader web seems a little basic.

Where is the linking to other sources from news stories, and fostering of online communities? Why does that PA ticker on the home page still have UK-wide news?

Not being a Scotsman I consulted with those living and having lived North of the boarder to gauge opinions.

The general consensus is that if this is more-or-less the finished product then the Scotsman seems to have missed a trick to really turn itself into the natural dedicated Scottish online news destination.

The fact that users still have to subscribe for near £30 a year to get the sites premium content, also still rankles with some.

The BBC offers relatively little online that is Scottish-focused; treating it like more like an English region on the web than a separate country, and The Herald seems to have been through turmoil which has stunted its ambitions online.

Against that backdrop the Scotsman could have really made a big splash with this relaunch. It still may do yet if it builds on these new incremental improvements.