As the Huffington Post goes live with its UK site today, ahead of the official launch event this evening, many journalists feel the site is wrong to recruit 300 unpaid bloggers.
Dave Lee, freelance journalist at the BBC, thinks that the Huffington Post causes damage to journalism.
While Manchester-based freelance journalist Louise Bolotin criticised Arianna Huffington for her policy.
However, not all reaction has been negative. Kat Brown has written a piece for Huffington Post’s lifestyle section titled Writing for Free Doesn’t Have to Mean Betrayal.
Writing for free is a grey area. Despite the ubiquity (and importance) of blogs and that many high profile sites trade content for prestige only, it’s often looked down upon if it makes up part of your career. When, as a newly-hatched post-grad, I joined one journalism forum, the stance was: “Don’t write unless you’re paid. It undermines you and it undermines journalism.”
So why write for free?
Free is why people write fanzines, update blogs and tweet. It’s pressure off, it’s the opportunity to practise something you enjoy and share it with people immediately. And particularly online, there’s a limited supply of people who will pay. My pitching skills are sufficiently atrocious that, if I were only to write for money outside my main job, I would probably forget how to hold a pencil within a year. I don’t want that, because I love writing and I need to do it.
UK editor-in-chief Carla Buzasi said today: “It’s a really interesting mix of people. Alastair Campbell is blogging for us on day one, and hopefully the others on the panel will be following suit shortly afterwards.”
The event is taking place at the Curzon Millbank, with the panel debate beginning at 7pm. An open invitation has been sent to the site’s bloggers-to-be to attend the launch.
Currently the url huffingtonpost.co.uk is password protected, but will be unveiled and made public this week.
By now most of you will have seen Ed Miliband’s interview where he gives almost identikit answers to questions posed by BBC, ITV and Sky News journalists.
Now Channel 4’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy has blogged about the episode, in which he criticises politicians’ tactic of repetitive responses in a post titled Changing the Rules of the TV Interview.
There’s nothing new about it, politicians have been doing it for years and it is partly our fault in the media for letting them get away with it for so long.
I’ve had politicians from every party try a variation of the loop on me. Somebody in political PR training school obviously told them that if you’re doing ‘a clip’ for the news and you want to make sure the media only use what you want them to then only say one thing.
He then goes on to suggest a way in which television interviews can be conducted with more transparency.
So perhaps it is time for a new deal between television and politics. Perhaps an interview should just be an interview without any rules. Or perhaps when politicians only agree to be clipped or pooled we should make it clear, when they repeat themselves they should be challenged on camera and when they refuse to debate with other guests we should say so.
ITV’s Damon Green, who was part of the pooled interview, also added his thoughts on Friday, remarking that “if we are not allowed to explore and examine a politician’s views, then politicians cease to be accountable in the most obvious way”. You can read his take on the interview here.
TechCrunch has revealed LinkedIn is now sending the site more referral traffic than Twitter.
Much of the traffic appears to be down to referrals from LinkedIn Today, a collection of articles shared by your connections – including via Twitter – but a quick look at the number of clicks a LinkedIn share button is acquiring suggests it is well worth adding.
TechCrunch’s post goes on to reveal this amazing fact:
The biggest stat of all is that a year ago, traffic coming from LinkedIn was 1/50th what it is today on a monthly basis.
So what changed? As far as we can tell, this is all about LinkedIn Today, the social news product the service launched back in March. It was around that time that was saw the first big bump in terms of traffic coming from LinkedIn. In March, it roughly doubled from February. Then April was pretty flat — it was still much higher than previously, but not growing. Then in May, traffic went up 5x. And in June, it more than doubled from that. The growth has been astounding.
Of course what’s perhaps most interesting about that is that LinkedIn Today is powered by Twitter. Twitter shared links determine what shows up on LinkedIn Today, but the traffic does not go back through Twitter.
Even more surprising is that the biggest traffic driver to TechCrunch is Facebook.
The truth is that if this were October of last year, you would have been right in thinking that Twitter was our top referrer in terms of social websites. But since that time, Facebook has far surpassed Twitter in terms of traffic coming our way each month. In fact, Facebook.com is now sends nearly double the traffic that Twitter.com does. This is probably due to the fact that last November, we added Elin, our excellent community manager, who curates and engages with people from our feed on Facebook. I also suspect it has to do with the rise of the like button. Ever since it was released last year, Facebook has been steadily referring more readers our way.
Speaking on today’s Journalism.co.uk #jpod on how journalists can best use Facebook pages Jack Riley, head of digital audience and content development at the Independent, explains how the Independent has seen an impressive growth in traffic to its news site via Facebook and how social referrals have overtaken traffic generated by search.
Riley states:
Just as we saw with the Google wave of the digital media revolution when everyone optimised their sites for search and SEO became a huge industry in its own right, now everyone is having to optimise their sites for social.
In the podcast Riley explains that this means adding open graph tags to articles so they are optimised for Facebook sharing.
But if your next step in social is adding LinkedIn share, here is how to add the button by copying and pasting a simple line of code.
TechCrunch’s post on its social traffic is well worth reading and is at this link.
StumbleUpon has released a new widget for news sites and blogs designed to help readers find content that is relevant to them.
It will highlight content that millions users of StumbleUpon, a social aggregator, have recommended and can be used by news outlets to “surface content on the site with the best shelf life”, according to a post on ReadWriteWeb.
ReadWriteWeb’s post explains why web publishers should sit up, take notice, and consider creating a StumbleUpon widget.
StumbleUpon claims to be the largest non-Facebook referrer of social media traffic. The company is not specific, but that would likely include Twitter, Reddit, Digg, XYDO and other similar tools for publishers. As of April 2010, StumbleUpon funneled twice as much traffic to publishers as Twitter. The user base is predominately between 18 and 34 years old and split 54 per cent male to 46 per cent female.
StumbleUpon has a couple of other publisher products as well, including badges (which look like any normal share button) and a URL shortener (su.pr). The company claims that publishers get 20-25 per cent more traffic from StumbleUpon when they institute badges.
There are a few drawbacks for publishers. A lot of publishers choose to self-aggregate content within posts or certain locations within their sites. The StumbleUpon widget would take that control from them and automate through the company’s index. Another drawback is widget/badge/button fatigue. Share buttons and third-party widgets have to be maintained by publishers and the more of them there are, the more of a time-consuming process it becomes. While the StumbleUpon widget takes up space where there would otherwise be nothing (or unsold ad inventory), it is another piece of real estate on the page.
Increasingly, it is hard to justify clutter for the sake of utilising empty space. Facebook and Twitter both have widgets as well, and those ecosystems have millions more users than StumbleUpon does. Sometimes, simpler is just better.
What do you think? Are you likely to install a StumbleUpon widget? Post your comment below.
Google has launched a social network with some Facebook-like features. Google+ (plus) is open by invitation only to a very limited number of people while it is in the field test stage but Google has released details on its blog as to how it works.
One of its features is called ‘circles’, which allows users to categorise contacts and only share items with particular groups such as close friends and family but opt to exclude work contacts.
According to the New York Times, this is the “one significant way” in which Google+ is different from Facebook and the way “Google hopes will be enough to convince people to use yet another social network”.
It is meant for sharing with groups — like colleagues, roommates or hiking friends — not with all of one’s friends or the entire web. It also offers group text messaging and video chat.
The stream functions a lot like Facebook’s news feed — a flow of information shared by your friends. If Google+ grows to critical mass, news providers could find it very important to get their content into the stream.
The ‘sparks’ section is a bigger innovation. Essentially, sparks are topics that users designate an interest in. Google uses Google+ sharing activity and +1s, as well as its famous search algorithms, to recommend personalised content for each spark, according to Mashable.
Suddenly the +1 button makes more sense. Google announced +1 in March as a way for users to express approval of any web page. Now it seems the +1 button will infuse not only search results, but also sparks, with social recommendations. TechCrunch interviewed Google officials about Google+ and reports: “You’ll see a +1 button on all Google+ content — the +1 button clearly ties deeply into all of this. It is going to be their Facebook ‘like’ button.”
So Google appears to have released its tweet or like button before the social network to share it. A case of the cart before the horse?
Poynter’s post goes on to assess the potential usefulness of Google+ and how it could affect news consumption and delivery. It also states that there has been much scepticism about its success, following less successful attempts with social projects Google Buzz and Google Wave, but author Jeff Sonderman suggests there is hope for Google+.
It’s fair to say that Google+ appears to be different, more comprehensive and more well-planned than any previous effort. The design is great, the ideas sound good and the company is making a large commitment to success.
Marshall Kirkpatrick from ReadWriteWeb has tried it out – and he is impressed, describing it as a “smart, attractive, very strong social offering from Google”.
It is well worth reading his post after he spent a night with the new social network.
But the New York Times argues its Google+ project, which has seen huge investment, may have come too late
In May, 180 million people visited Google sites, including YouTube, compared with 157.2 million on Facebook, according to comScore. But Facebook users looked at 103 billion pages and spent an average of 375 minutes on the site, while Google users viewed 46.3 billion pages and spent 231 minutes.
Advertisers pay close attention to those numbers — and to the fact that people increasingly turn to Facebook and other social sites like Twitter to ask questions they used to ask Google, like a recommendation for a restaurant or doctor.
The article goes on to explain why Google+ has now come at this time, long after Facebook’s creation.
Larry Page, Google’s co-founder, regrets Google’s failure to lead in this market and has spent time working with the team since he became chief executive in April, people at the company say. He promoted [Vic] Gundotra to senior vice president this year, placing him on an equal level with the heads of Google’s core products like search and ads.
Part of the blame, analysts say, falls on Google’s engineering-heavy culture, which values quantitative data and algorithms over more abstract pursuits like socialising.
The consensus of blog posts seems to be another positive cultural shift for Google is strong design, as the Next Web reports.
Google+ and all that falls under its umbrella looks good — really good. The trademark minimalism is still present, but it’s been done with style (is that contradictory?) and is something to be appreciated.
That’s because interface designer Andy Hertzfeld, member of the original Apple Macintosh team, was given free reign over design decisions, AppleInsider reports.
Despite the headline, Hertzfeld is quoted in the piece describing the process and it seems he was not so much given free reign as he took it. “Better to ask forgiveness than permission” and so on.
Hertzfeld was worried that Larry Page wouldn’t like it with its animations and drag-and-drop fanciness, but “he loves it”.
A video overview from Google explains how Google+ works
The BBC reported late yesterday that Urunboy Usmonov, its Central Asian Service journalist being held in Tajikistan, is physically and psychologically frail, according to a colleague who managed to visit him in prison.
Hamid Ismailov, from the BBC Central Asian service, said he was “horrified” to see Urunboy Usmonov in a detention centre in the northern city of Khujand.
According to the BBC, which reported Usmonov’s detention earlier this month, the reporter has been charged with association with Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, allegations which the broadcaster claims are “unfounded”.
A Russian journalist, who was placed into an induced coma after being beaten in Moscow last year, has defeated a libel claim against him after speculating on the identity of his attackers, according to Index on Censorship.
According to Index, a Moscow court ruled in favour of Kashin as it could not be proven that accusations were made as factual statements.
The attack itself sparked an open letter from 26 media outlets and journalists calling on the president to ensure greater protections for journalists, while the Committee to Protect Journalists‘ executive director also gave a statement condemning the attack and calling for action.
The guide, titled “Twitter for Newsrooms,” is a little bit obvious for anyone who uses Twitter on a daily basis. There’s no new info here, just tips on how to report, engage with other users and followers and how to use tweets in the process of reporting. But the fact that Twitter has launched an official guide for journalists is indicative of the impact of social media on the news.
#TfN is Twitter’s official nudge to old school reporters, a heavy handed reminder to get with the program and embrace Twitter as media production and consumption device.
The 10,000 Words blog is a little more positive on its usefulness for all journalists:
While much of the information won’t ring fresh for reporters already knee-deep in social media sourcing, it’s a comprehensive and helpful resource for journalists of all levels hoping to gain some insight into Twitter’s potential for journalists.
This is basic stuff – tools, examples, glossary, links, support. That’s as it should be, I reckon. The newsroom denizens who understand Twitter well enough to build their own techniques are still vastly in the minority. This is about bridging a gap.
#Report gives advice to journalists on when and how to use the following four tools, plus advice on finding sources, and mobile tips.
On the subject of the advanced Twitter search, Hamilton writes:
I’m glad Twitter is making more of its advanced search tools. They’re immensely useful for journalists, but unless you already know about them they’re next to impossible to use. Including them here, prominently, is smart. And it’s wise to explain there’s a difference between Top and All tweets, even if it’s still not clear what “most relevant” means in this context.
#Englage has advice on effective tweeting, with good examples;
#Publish explains how to follow, retweet, favourite and reply, and how to use BlackBird pie, which displays tweets in WordPress;
#Extra, as you might have guessed, includes all the other facts a Twitter beginner may need to know (though can probably be worked out simply watching a stream and trying it out).
Another point well made by Hamilton is:
Twitter is protecting/building its brand. Some of these guidelines are about making sure the platform gets credit for quotes and information shared there. Others offer ways to embed Twitter functionality on news sites. It reminds me of Facebook’s Open Graph plugins, in a nascent and very specific way – proliferating its own platform while performing useful functions. Aiming to become needed, where it isn’t already.
