Author Archives: Oliver Luft

About Oliver Luft

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

Simple embedding of Google Maps

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Google has made embedding maps into blogs and websites easier for those without all-singing all-dancing knowledge of flash and the like. The function works in similar ways to embedding YouTube videos – the service gives you a bit of code that you can slap quickly into a report. Should make breaking news reporting online even more captivating.

This is the J.co.uk office on a Google Map:
View Larger Map

Obviously I spoke too soon, while I can link to the map I can’t embed – looks like Word Press might have the same problems with embedded maps as it has with YouTube coding – I’ll look into it and repost.

Here’s a link to the announcement

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New football email from the Times gets hackles up @ Guardian’s Fiver

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Imitation might not be the sincerest form of flattery for the people who write the Guardian’s daily email about football gossip – The Fiver.

Reacting with the elan of a chided teenager, The Fiver dedicated last Wednesday’s edition to ripping the piss out of the newly launched Times football email – Ahead of the Game. Mocking the launch thus:

Yes, folks, we’ve had a brainwave! The Fiver is dead – long live Behind The Times, our original, groundbreaking, new, crazy, alpha-male email about FOOTER!!! So sign up to our flagship new venture, and we will send you FIVE minutes of F.U.N. about FOOTER to your inbox EVERY DAY!!!! AT 5PM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It’s a bit like the Fiver… only TRULY USEFUL. And about FOOTER! Yes, you heard that right! It’s about FOOTER! And you really can use it!

And later:

120

The number of minutes Ahead Of The Game should wait each day at 4pm before sending out their all-new funny email about footer. That way, they could save themselves a load of unnecessary bother by simply cutting and pasting the contents of the Fiver and sending those out (but not before correcting all our spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, and adding some funny jokes).

Followed by reams of links to old news stories.

Funny? Well, for a bit.

Online news as trustworthy as print for majority of readers, survey claims

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Online news platforms are just as trustworthy as their magazine and newspaper editions for the majority of readers, according to a ONLINE survey (Might this a bit of ‘well, obviously’ research?).

Research from the UK’s Association of Online Publishers (AOP) found that 81 per cent of newspaper readers and 74 per cent of magazine readers responding to the survey considered online editions equally trustworthy as the printed version.

The association’s dual consumption survey asked 26,926 respondents across 37 AOP member websites about their usage and attitudes of the sites and their offline equivalents.

All dandy? Well what other results would you expect if you conduct an online survey? Aren’t you more likely to get a response that is receptive to net editions if you ask people using the net – and even using those editions?

Anywho – 72 per cent of newspaper respondents and 66 per cent of magazine respondents considered the website and its offline equivalent to be equally reliable.

Sixty per cent of both newspaper and magazine respondents agreed that the website enabled them to find things faster than using the offline equivalent.

The survey also suggested that individual news and magazine brands were more important than the platforms on which they were delivered, as 60 per cent of respondents did not want to choose between the two as webs and print editions fulfilled different and distinct consumption needs.

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Sky News claims 58 per cent traffic increase from last year

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Sky News has claimed it recorded a 58% increase of traffic in July, from last year’s 3 million monthly unique users to 4.8 million this year, as a result of people looking at its reporting of the UK’s floods.

Sky claimed that features, such as an interactive map, gave key regional information on the flooded areas. Sky News’ web visitors also sent in more than a thousand flood pictures for its online galleries helping – says Sky – to build up a detailed, interactive picture of the unfolding news event.

According to the Murdoch owned site the amount of time users spent on the site increased by 15%. In total there were 16.5 million visits to the site last month, up 85% from 8.9 million visits recorded in July 2006.

On Monday 23 July the site claims to have received 7.5 million page impressions; the highest figures since the 7/7 London Bombings two years ago – still the site’s highest figures with 35 million page impressions (126.6 million for July 2005).

The Sky.com portal is ABCe audited, however, the figures are not broken down to give specific results for its news portal.

ITV citizen journalism platform – just a vox pop by another name?

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We reported here a few weeks ago that ITV had set up and was about to launch a Cit Journo platform called Uploaded.

“For the first time, viewers’ contributions will not just be an add-on to coverage of the big stories – they will become an integral part of all three ITV News bulletins every day… A Citizen Exclusives section will give everyone a platform to contact the ITV News team directly if they have captured amazing exclusive footage.”

It launched yesterday, according to the pr blurb to:

“creating the UK’s first nationwide network of citizen correspondents who can shape TV news
coverage on a daily basis.”

ITV sees the site as a big unwashed debating arena, the best posts of which will find their way into its TV news offerings. Delegates at the Future of News conference, in London last month, were more skeptical.

“Isn’t this just a vox pop by another name?’ came the cry from the floor.

Au contraire, claimed Deborah Turness, editor of ITV News, this is active civic participation in news, feeding the news agenda.

But don’t editors then select the talking heads according to their editorial line? How is that any different from a vox pop if there isn’t any input to the editorial process from those contributing to debates?

‘Facebook Effect’ developing widgets boosts your site traffic

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Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, it’s all I ever hear. But could research from Quantcast finally have made the tangible link between the social site and others that news publishers were waiting to hear?

It claims that developing widgets for the site results in increasing site traffic for  those developing the apps – ‘The Facebook Effect’
“Quantcast found a common dramatic increase in traffic for those publishers that have built and deployed widgets (“applications”) on the Facebook platform.”

“Just six weeks into Facebook’s open platform initiative, we are seeing striking results,” said Konrad Feldman, co-founder and CEO, Quantcast Corporation. “The Facebook platform is driving substantial incremental traffic to application publishers’ Web sites, as consumers find new routes to exploring their wares.”

The Quantcast charts below (figures 1 and 2) reveal the relative growth in daily uniques to three leading widget publishers, each with multiple applications running on the Facebook platform. Since Facebook’s open platform initiative began on May 25th of this year:

  • Slide, the leading personal media network, has more than tripled its global reach in Web site traffic.
    • Slide grew domestic U.S. daily unique visitors from approximately 312,000 to more than 1.1 million, an increase of 265 percent.
    • Slide grew global daily unique visitors from approximately 753,000 to more than 2.3 million, an increase of 207 percent.
  • HOTorNOT, an early leader in social media, has doubled its global reach in Web site traffic.
    • HOTorNOT grew domestic U.S. daily unique visitors from approximately 182,000 to more than 350,000, an increase of 98 percent.
    • HOTorNOT grew global daily unique visitors from approximately 289,000 to more than 722,000, an increase of 152 percent.
  • RockYou, creator and distributor some of the most popular self-expression widgets on the Web, has more than tripled its global reach in Web site traffic.
    • RockYou grew domestic U.S. daily unique visitors from approximately 145,000 to more than 521,000, an increase of 228 percent.
    • RockYou tripled its global reach, increasing global unique visitors from approximately 286,000 to more than 1.3 million, an increase of 339 percent.

Figures 1 and 2 reveal the relative growth in daily unique visitors for domestic U.S. and Global audiences, respectively:

Facebookfig1

Facebookfig2

Now, just ’cause it worked for these few, doesn’t say to me that it will work for others. Yet it shows that those talking Facebook  on its own terms are most likely to reap the benefits.

Why are news providers on Facebook?

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Bit of a follow up to the piece I wrote last week about news apps on Facebook – I quoted Rob Curley, from Washington Post Newsweek Interactive, quite heavily in the piece.

He has since updated with this post expanding on why Wash Post is developing Facebook apps. One of the main reasons – he claims – is marketing, getting Wash Post name and values out there without necessarily having just to rely on news apps to try and drag some of Facebooks page views back to the Wash Post news site.

But the value of the marketing, it seems, comes down to the usability of the app in question. Wash Post had a good start with Compass, which lingered in the top five apps on Facebook for some time, and plans are afoot to revisit the device with some updates and add-ons.

Appaholic.com or a similar device can then be used to measure use/success of the app: how many are looking at it, what time of day, etc, etc – but what this all means and what good can do the news producer is still seems rather arbitrary.