Author Archives: Oliver Luft

About Oliver Luft

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

AOP: Hyper-local sites have to be news driven – Washington Post Interactive chief on the failure of some sites

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Hyper-local sites have to be driven by news the chief executive of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive told the AOP conference.

“Some of the hyper-local sites that have failed, in my view, there isn’t any hard data there, there is just people commenting or talking to each other,” Caroline Little told delegates.

“If it’s not structured around something that is changing then it may as well be on Facebook or email or something else. We need to provide something to make it interesting.”

Speaking about the databases and Google Maps mash-ups that drive the Post’s Loudoun hyper-local site, she added:

“Publishing news is important to people locally, even if it’s a crime database, what happened last night on what street, people want to know that.

“We also have local bloggers who live in the community. But I believe without that local news piece, which is fresh and updated constantly, you’re just not going to build habit locally.”

AOP: What the Washington Post will do next – mobile, Europe and a relaunch in the Spring

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Caroline Little, chief executive of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, told the AOP conference, in London today, that the Post would be focusing its attention on developing its mobile offerings as a way of expanding its audience.

“We’re really far behind in mobile compared to Europeans, that’s one area that we are really focusing on right now,” she said.

“Not just on mobile phones but also being able to read stuff on your Blackberry or iPhone, or whatever else. We are really far behind. It’s an area that we are really pushing forward on.”

During a Q&A session she was asked if the Post was looking actively at other markets internationally.

“We are in the UK, we have advertising offices here. But in terms of editorial, we’re not looking at hyper-local content outside of our market.

“You have to do what you know, but we would like to do more in Europe and we have some plans to do that.”

The Post, she added, is planning an entire redesign in the Spring next year.

Four rules for using citizen journalists regularly on your paper – from those in the know

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Bara Prochazkova from Czech paper Denik, speaking at the INMA and IFRA seminars in Warsaw, last week, laid down a few ground rules – learnt the hard way – for dealing with citizen journalists.

According to the INMA blog (a big thank you to friend of J.co.uk Grzegorz Piechota, of Gazeta Wyborcza, in Poland, for the point) Denik is the largest Czech broadsheet newspaper, with average sales of 330 copies [whoops – I hope that’s a typo].

For over a year, each of the 75 local branches [hoping that’s not a typo] of the paper carry a local Reader’s page of user-generated journalism.

Here are the rules they have padded together as the best way to deal with their contributors:

1. Do not let this become the forum about reader’s pets. Denik organizes workshops where basic journalist techniques are discussed.
2. Readers resolve tend to weaken, if they receive too little feedback.
3. How to keep readers interested? Small gifts or cash prizes.
4. Pages get dominated by older people without active marketing to the young.

Two views on the future of blogging UK – granular quantity or ‘quality’ big blogs

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The British blogosphere had an ripple of excitement last week with the launch of Messy Media‘s first offering – Westmonster.

In interview with Journalism.co.uk developers Lloyd Shepherd and Andrew Levy talked about their strategy for launching, what they hope, will be a relatively small number of ‘high quality’ blogs ‘that appeal to a mass audience’.

And up their sleeves? A worker-centric blog about the City, blogs on motoring and journalism, as well as a celebrity title written for ‘people with a brain’.

They want big audience, US style (and bigger advertising returns – no doubt?). Can it work like that? They say they want to win the audience with ‘quality’ rather than quantity.

But can a popular, eyeball-heavy blog just be quality without the quantity?

Ashley Norris, co-founder of Shiny Media, told Journalism.co.uk that Shiny was a ‘mini content factory‘ continually producing a mix of content – news, opinion, and extra background material – in a bid to keep readers coming back to the site, again and again, during the day.

And it’s a strategy he thinks has still got legs, saying there is still huge potential to launch niche blogs in the UK, building large audiences through multiple publications, as more and more leisure pursuits find an outlet on the web.

“There is a massive opportunity, part of me thinks that at the moment we should just continue to churn out blog after blog after blog in different verticals, because virtually every time we have done it, after a time it has reached a point where it’s getting a significant amount of UK traffic and interest from UK advertisers.”

Comments not so popular on Google News

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Google, last month, started accepting and publishing comments related to some stories it linked to. The system is very limited and experimental, you have to email Google with your comment and then a human decides whether it can be listed along with links to the relevant story.

You also have to be some way involved in the story for them to publish the comment. Cue reams and reams of rhetorical PR as comment, you’d think? In part, you’d be right. But the more startling thing is how very few comments have so far been posted.

So far only around 108 comments have been made in the month since Google launched the service (thanks to Steve Rubel for pointing this out, he also notes it’s possible to get a feed of the comments on Google News) even if it is a limited experiment I’d expect a few more than that, and I’d expect them to be more informed and move the story on more than the random sample I looked at.

Wonder what would happen if they let the audience in?

Journalism.co.uk has relaunched with changes both cosmetic and under-the-bonnet, let us know what you think…

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For the past few months we have been working on a few changes to improve Journalism.co.uk and make using the site easier and more intuitive.

We’ve changed the content management system for the site so vast majority of alterations are under the bonnet and aren’t visible. However, there are a few immediately noticeable cosmetic changes.

The most obvious change is the wholesale switch from the garish green to a grey, pink and white design, which we think is a good deal easier on the eye.

We have also adopted a wider page profile and tidied up the left hand column, introducing a ‘job of the week’ feature and generally making it more straightforward and easier for those seeking freelancers and/or jobs listings.

The homepage news elements have adopted a tabbed format; again, making accessing all the content we have on offer a lot easier for those coming to us through the front page.

The three lead stories are now on a timed rotation, although you can also flick between them using the by clicking the ‘Next’ button.

Alongside news and features from Journalism.co.uk we have added tabs for our recommendations of related news on other sites (a feature we had on the old home page) and given a front-page presence to our J-blogs mash-up of the best in journalism blogs.

This feature has lived on the site for a few months now but its popularity and the great wealth of informed and varied comment has necessitated a move to the homepage.

We have also added drop down menus links to the new (ish) forum and blogging areas of the site.

Forums are there for people to seed debates, make announcements and generally discuss anything journalism-related that they feel strongly about.

The blog was introduced quietly a couple of weeks ago and now is the new young love of the editorial staff.

We have also improved the navigation between story pages by highlighting our ‘other recent news’ at the top of the right-hand column. Beneath this we have introduced a feature that highlights the most ‘commented on’ news stories and below that an additional feature that will automatically pull in related news items.

Because we have made so many changes to the site we expect to come across a few teething problems that will be sorted out over the course of the next couple of weeks. If you come across anything that we miss feel free to drop us an email so we can rectify it.

Right, that’s about it. Hope you like the new site.

Twitter new stuff

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Been a big week for Twitter – they have announced THREE new additions which will start to have a presence on the site:

  • Search – so you can find you friends.
  • Gmail app – importing Gmail contacts
  • Explore – to list some of the tools people can use to interact with Twitter off the site

(Thanks to TechCrunch for the skinny on these additions)

Perhaps another thing to mention is that ReporTwitters.com has now gone live. We wrote about it earlier in the week: it’s a site so that fanatical reporters who just can’t live without the thing can post news reports and their twitter posts in the same place.

A ‘more-realistic’ rounded view of the news, is the half-cocked reasoning. Still, might be an addition to the explore feature before too long.

News widgets in under 30 secs

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Want to make yourself a widget for your blog or site with news headlines from a single provider?

Nothing could be simpler. Widgetbox.com is just one of many services that allow you to enter the url of a site and create a quick widget of the latest news headlines. www.widgetnest.net is another – and the one we used to create the Journalism.co.uk widget.