Category Archives: Editors’ pick

Less than half of BBC breakfast team confirm Salford move

Leave a reply

In a statement released late on Thursday, the BBC confirmed that 46 per cent of its BBC Breakfast team, including presenters Bill Turnbull and Susanna Reid, have confirmed that they will move to Salford Quays next year, to a new base at MediaCityUK.

This along with just a quarter of the Marketing & Audiences team in scope to move and 33 per cent from BBC Connect & Create, puts the combined total of confirmed moves at 55 per cent, the broadcaster claimed, a figure which includes staff outside of scope who volunteered to move.

The BBC confirmed that journalists Sian Williams and Chris Hollins have decided “for personal reasons” not to make the move, but added that they will “continue to be involved in the programme for the foreseeable future”.

Broadcasting over three hours of live television every day on BBC One and the News Channel, Breakfast will be the first BBC television network news programme produced and broadcast from outside London. It is the UK’s most watched morning TV programme, with a daily reach of around seven million and a weekly reach of around 12 million.

See the full BBC release here…

Media Guardian: Sport Media Group suspends trading

Leave a reply

The publisher of the Daily Sport and Sunday Sport, Sport Media Group, has suspended trading on the stockmarket according to a report by the Media Guardian today.

The decision follows a “deterioration in trading”, the report adds.

SMG, which in 2009 was saved from going out of business by former proprietor and West Ham co-owner David Sullivan, said that the business has experienced an “insufficient recovery” since the poor weather in December with “consequential pressure on the company’s working capital position”.

Full report here…

Mashable: Converting a Facebook profile to a Facebook page

Leave a reply

Mashable is reporting on something that will come in very handy to anyone who has created a personal Facebook ‘profile’ rather than a ‘page’ for a newspaper, news website or other organisation: a Facebook profile can now be converted to a page.

Though the terminology is often muddled, a key difference between the two features is that users can simply “like” a Page while they must “friend” (establish a mutual relationship with) a profile, which makes Pages a much better solution for businesses and public figures.

Using Facebook’s new tool any ‘Friends’ from a profile will be transferred to become ‘fans’ of the new page.

Mashable’s full post is at this link.

New York Post: Lady Gaga to try her hand at fashion journalism

Leave a reply

The New York Post has reported that queen of outrageous ensembles Lady Gaga is to try her hand at fashion journalism as a columnist for US glossy V Magazine,

“V are proud to announce our newest columnist: Lady Gaga! Each issue, Mother Monster will put pen to the page, bringing us an editorial window into her fashion multiverse,” the American fashion glossy said in a statement.

The New York Post’s article is at this link.

Poynter: Google’s new +1 social search and news publishers

1 Reply

This week Google announced a new recommendation tool called +1 which enables users to flag up favourite search results.

Over on Poynter Damon Kiesow looks at the “significant impact” this could have on the way publishers work to draw in visitors online.

For publishers, the result is that pages given a +1 by readers will appear more prominently in Google searches, and will be highlighted as recommendations by friends within the reader’s social network. That network only extends to Google products currently, but it is expected to include Twitter and other services in the future.

And in time publishers themselves will be able to put the +1 buttons on their own web pages, Kiesow adds.

When that does happen, it has the potential to swing the balance of power in the traffic referral battles back toward Google. In the past year, the search giant has seen Facebook increase its influence as a source of web traffic.

NYTimes.com: Video of four journalists held in Libya

Leave a reply

The four New York Times journalists freed after being held for six days in Libya earlier this month, reflect on their time in captivity in a video on NYTimes.com.

Following their release they spoke of the ‘days of brutality’ they faced while being detained.

British born foreign correspondent Stephen Farrell; photographer Lynsey Addario, who has also been detained and held at gunpoint in Iraq, photographer Tyler Hicks and Beirut bureau chief Anthony Shadid describe how they were punched, kicked and groped, and driven for eight hours to “the heart of Colonel Gaddafi’s regime”, described by Farrell as “a very rare insight for western journalists”.

Media Guardian: Rebekah Brooks asked for police payment details

2 Replies

The Guardian has reported that News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks has been asked by the chair of the home affairs select committee to provide details of payments allegedly made to police officers.

This follows the appearance of John Yates, the acting deputy commissioner of the Metropolitan police, before the committee on Tuesday, when he said the force’s special crimes directorate is “doing some research” into an admission in 2003 by Brooks, a former News of the World editor, that staff at News International had made payments to the force.

Keith Vaz MP, the chairman of the committee, wrote to Brooks on Wednesday asking her for information on how many officers were paid for tips or stories, the amounts they received and when the practice stopped.

Read the full Guardian report here…

BBC College of Journalism blog: Google not to blame for journalism’s woes

Leave a reply

Peter Barron, former editor of BBC Newsnight and now director of external relations for Europe, Middle East and Africa at Google, has responded to ongoing criticisms that Google News is profiting off the back of content form news websites. In a guest post on the BBC College of Journalism blog Barron repeats the argument that Google News signposts readers towards stories – claiming one billion click-throughs a month from Google News to news websites.

He also refers to Google’s new online payment tool One Pass, which he identifies as a way of supporting news organisations “in finding their way through the current challenges”.

We work with publishers which have chosen the ad-supported model to help find ways to engage readers for longer, making the advertisements more valuable. We have built the One Pass payment tool to make it easier for publishers which want to charge for their content online, giving them flexibility to choose what content they charge for, at what price, and how – day-pass, one-time access, subscription and so on. And Google is investing in not-for-profit organisations to encourage innovation in digital journalism.

The full blog post is at this link.

paidContent UK: Mail Online on iPad next week

Leave a reply

paidContent UK is reporting that the Mail Online is due to launch on the iPad next week. According to the article, Mail Online publisher A&N Media aims to grow digital to represent a quarter of its revenue by 2016 “by adding a range of new subscription options and tilting away from advertising alone”.

A&N won’t get there by wedding itself to paid content, however. “We’ve not adopted any ideological beliefs in terms of paid versus free and remain open,” [A&N CEO Kevin] Beatty said. “Mail Online newspapers’ iPad edition is released next week … with our iPad edition, we’ll be trialling both paid and free models.”

The publisher has previously said the Mail Online website will remain free whilst it pitches its growing audience scale to advertisers.

According to the latest figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations, Mail Online has almost 51 million monthly unique visitors, (February 2011). The latest results represented the site’s first month-on-month fall in traffic for more than a year, after reaching just over 56 million in the slightly longer month of January.

The Cutline: Guardian working on ‘significant US expansion’

Leave a reply

Yahoo media blog the Cutline reports that the Guardian is busy building a new US digital operation which “will be significantly larger” than the Guardian’s previous work in the US.

Vague details around the plans were revealed in a Cutline interview with Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger.

He said the liberal English broadsheet is building a new US digital operation that will be based in New York rather than Washington, D.C. (The paper’s roughly 10 stateside reporters are currently based in both cities.) Pressed for additional details, Rusbridger demurred, but said the venture “will be significantly larger than anything we’ve done in the states before.” He was presumably referring to the Guardian’s previous attempts to crack the American news market, the most recent being GuardianAmerica.com, which had a short run between 2007 and 2009.

The Guardian began laying the groundwork for this expansion of its American shop last week with the addition of a New York-based chief revenue officer, whose job will be “to plot a fresh course in the US,” according to paidContent’s Robert Andrews.

A spokesperson for the Guardian had no further comment.