Carbuncle Cup 2011: Media City UK is Britain’s ugliest new building

1 Reply

Media City UK, a 'crazed accumulation of development'. Photo by University of Salford on Flickr. Some rights reserved

Media City UK in Salford, the new home of parts of the BBC, has been crowned the ugliest new building in Britain in this year’s Carbuncle Cup.

The awards, run by Building Design magazine, said the building had beaten “strong competition” to take the uncoveted annual award.

With characteristic reserve, a jury of national newspaper architecture critics – Rowan Moore of the Observer, Hugh Pearman of the Sunday Times, and Jonathan Glancey of the Guardian – called the site a “crazed accumulation of development” in which “aimlessly gesticulating” buildings betray a sense of “extreme anxiety” on the part of the architects.

“One is not looking for the Gate of Honour at Gonville & Caius, but… something!”, said Moore.

Lowly commended for the award was the new Museum of Liverpool, with the runners up including the One Hyde Park Development, Newport Train Station, and Brighton’s Ebenezer Chapel. The chapel development is round the corner from Journalism.co.uk’s own offices, a marvel of understated, retro design.

@ITVLauraK: My Twitter followers don’t belong to the BBC, ITV, or me

Leave a reply

Former BBC News chief political correspondent Laura Kuenssberg began her new role as ITV business editor today. Kuenssberg built up quite a Twitter following during her time at the BBC, around 67,000 people, due in no small part to her coverage of last year’s general election saga.

In the wake of the announcement of her move to ITV there was, in her own words, “frenzied conversation” about what would happen to her Twitter account. It was, after all, a professional account, it had BBC in the name. So who did the followers belong to?

In the end, the agreement with the BBC was “entirely amicable”, according to Kuenssberg, and she transferred her account and followers to @ITVLauraK.

Today she writes on her new ITV blog about her take on the issue of professional Twitter accounts and ownership:

Given my belief that those who tweet have minds of their own, the clamour over what would happen to @BBCLauraK, the corporation’s first official journalist Twitter stream, took me rather by surprise. But, more importantly, what the fuss did demonstrate was how central online reporting has become to the work of journalists. No doubt, having started tweeting as an experiment two years ago during the party conference season, it became almost as important to me to break stories on Twitter as it did to get them on air on the BBC’s rolling news channel.

Read the full post at this link.

#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – newspaper lessons in using QR codes to drive traffic

Leave a reply

Newspapers interested in how to make use of QR codes (quick reader codes) could take a look at a post on Poynter which details the way six US newspapers have been using QR codes to drive traffic to their websites. By assessing the news organisations’ different approaches, Poynter’s post has some helpful advice for anyone trying to make QR codes, which allow users to scan a printed code with their smartphone to take them to a specific web page, work for them. One advantage of a QR code as opposed to a printed link is the ability to monitor the traffic from the code.

The post advises:

Be sure to provide information on how to use the codes.

[Danny Sanchez, online content manager at the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel] suggests putting production rules in place for the codes, making them no smaller than ¾” x ¾” and keeping them off the fold, “which makes it maddeningly difficult to scan”. Editors at the Sun-Sentinel also provide a standard URL redirect next to the code, for those who can’t or won’t scan it.

Creative examples in the post include that of the Washington Post, which has been putting QR codes on “could-be-viral stories” to let readers share them on their Facebook page or the Palm Beach Post, which used a QR code to link to an interactive quiz that let people take five sample questions from the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test given to eighth grade students.

Poynter’s full post is at this link

Tipster: Sarah Marshall

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

Wall Street Journal uses Foursquare list feature for hurricane evacuation centres

Leave a reply

As Hurricane Irene lashed the east coast of the US at the weekend, the Wall Street Journal used Foursquare’s recently-launched tip lists feature to provide details of the locations of New York City evacuation centres.

The tip lists were launched on 15 August and were used by the WSJ for a breaking news story less than a fortnight later.

Users of Foursquare, the mobile phone app and social network which has 10 million members worldwide, can check-in and share their location with their friends and contacts by using the WSJ’s NYC Hurricane Evacuation Centers Foursquare list.

A total of 130 people follow the evacuation centres on Foursquare, a low number when compared to other networks (the New York Times @NYTLive Twitter account accrued 22,000 followers in three days when reporting on the hurricane), but the WSJ’s innovative use of lists is another example how news publishers can interact with readers.

Eric Friedman, director of business development at Foursquare, told Journalism.co.uk how the WSJ list works:

This is a page that the Wall Street Journal can administer and actually people can follow the list, which is a great way for them to interact with their current fan base on Foursquare and also as resource for anyone else for a quick way to develop something that was extemely helful in a potentially very damaging storm.

Friedman went on to explain another way in which the WSJ has used the platform.

It’s a way for them to build a following on a new network, which is Foursquare, and for them to get really timely and relevant information attached to a place.

In the past they’ve use [their Foursquare page] to attach breaking news to a place, when something is going on in Times Square, for example. They’ve also used it in a way which is very interesting, for past historial events to let someone know “hey, I’m at the Brooklyn Bridge”, here’s what happened at this time on this date many, many years ago. So it’s a way of bringing the old Journal information to the forefront as well as a way bringing new information to someone in a breaking way.

Mashable has more information on user-generated tip lists allowing users to create crowdsourced lists.

US study finds 92% of B2B journalists use LinkedIn

1 Reply

A study by US company Arketi Group has found 92 per cent of journalists writing for B2B publications use LinkedIn, 85 per cent of journalists are on Facebook, 84 per cent use Twitter.

Out of the journalists surveyed, 58 per cent have a YouTube account, 49 per cent have a blog, 28 per cent use Flickr, 20 per cent use Digg, 18 per cent have a MySpace account, 15 per cent use Delicious and 14 per cent use Foursquare, according to this report.

Meanwhile, LinkedIn has published advice on its blog for freelancers and those who juggle journalism careers with other jobs.

For example, a freelance or part-time journalist may also be a yoga tutor and have to decide whether or not to include details of both careers in a LinkedIn profile.

Your first decision is whether you want to feature both careers on your LinkedIn profile. If you think it might be puzzling or even damaging to one of your jobs to feature both on your profile, then simply leave off your other employment. There is no rule that you have to show everything you do on LinkedIn.

If, on the other hand, you want to promote both of your jobs or careers, here are two ways to do that effectively:

  • Embrace the slash mark: Marci Alboher, author of One Person/Multiple Careers, coined the term “slash careerist” or “slasher” to refer to individuals who can’t answer “what do you do?” with a single word or phrase. If you’re perfectly comfortable being a tech salesperson/photographer or a lawyer/SAT tutor, then proudly display this as your LinkedIn headline.

You’ll also want to list both of these positions as your current employment in your profile. The way to include more than one job as current is to put the end dates of both jobs as “present”. Note that whichever role began more recently will be displayed first.

  • If, instead, you want to highlight one of your jobs more prominently (e.g., because you’re hoping to land a new job in that field or believe you’ll have more networking opportunities related to that role), then I recommend writing a profile headline featuring that role exclusively and listing it as your only current position.

The LinkedIn blog post aso has advice from freelancers who are seeking a full-time position.

Here is a Journalism.co.uk podcast on how journalists can best use LinkedIn

 

 

 

 

 

paidContent: Apple drops Financial Times apps from store

Leave a reply

Apple has pulled the Financial Times’ native iPad and iPhone apps from the iTunes App Store after updating its terms which state in-app subscriptions must be paid through the store, reports paidContent.

The FT launched a web-based app in June which allows the publisher to avoid paying Apple a 30 per cent cut of it’s app revenue and to gather its own audience data.

This article on paidContent states:

It is a blow to the FT, whose apps had processed subscription transactions independently. Last year, 10 percent of its new digital subscriptions were taken out on iPads. But the publisher says its model is premised on owning data about customers that goes through along with transactions. This was more important to it than Apple’s 30 percent take, CEO John Ridding told [Robert Andrews] recently.

The FT’s web app, which was described as a ‘wake-up call’ to publishers, saw 150,000 uses in the first 10 days before the part-paywall went up, in line with the FT’s other digital platforms.

 

 

 

FT study exposes problems in finding media information on corporate websites

1 Reply

A study by the Financial Times and web effectiveness experts Bowen Craggs has found many corporate websites fail to provide journalists with information and serve the media in a useful and effective way – which is often not in the company’s favour in terms of generating positive press coverage.

The study finds “many press offices simply do not see the online medium as an important” and this article (part paywall) in the FT theorises that this could be as many press officers are former journalists who left the industry before the advent of online and social media.

The FT Bowen Craggs Index looks at:

How well a site caters to four areas of journalistic enquiry: the news release service and archiving; the ready availability of good quality contact information; the range of background about the company and its industry; and the provision of publication quality imagery.

News release service

The FT article states journalists “do not want to be spoon fed”:

Give them a ready-made story, and they will either ignore it, or look for a way to put a different twist on it (not necessarily in the company’s favour). The last thing they want is to write the same story as other people. What they do want is leads, which explains the keenness with which they have taken to Twitter. Companies need to understand Twitter – both to feed journalists leads and to get early warning that a nasty news storm is about to blow in.

Contact information and background about the company and its industry

The FT article states:

[Journalists] tend to be in a hurry, and impatient. Their inclination is often to pick up the phone rather than trawl a site. Companies can make themselves unpopular by failing to make press contacts easy to find.

Provision of images

The study found that “one of the most significant trends this year comes from the image library metric”:

The big move forward is the increasing use of Flickr as a complementary library: see for example Nestlé and Novartis.

A remarkable number of companies do not provide an image library at all – almost a quarter of the companies in the Index, including most of the Chinese companies but also a slew of banks – Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Santander, Westpac and more. Why? If you do not provide images yourselves, media organisations will surely go to your rivals or to a library.

German company Siemans comes out on top and is heralded as an example of best practice of serving the media. It has an index of 28. An example of a lower score is Johnson and Johnson with an index of nine.

Brian Cathcart: Sun and Mirror contempt case may make editors think twice

Leave a reply

There is good piece by Brian Cathcart on the Index on Censorship site, in which he predicts that Dominic Grieve’s prosecution of the Sun and the Mirror over their coverage of the arrest of Chris Jefferies may make editors think twice about casually flouting contempt of court laws.

The Contempt of Court Act of 1981 prohibits all but the most straightforward reporting in a crime case from the moment “proceedings are active”, in other words once someone is arrested. The idea is to ensure that coverage does not interfere with the course of justice, for instance by prejudicing the eventual jury. But for years, when a big, competitive story came along, many editors and reporters in national media simply ignored the Act and continued to publish often grotesque allegations about a suspect after arrest and even sometimes after they were charged. Think Colin Stagg, Barry George,Karen Matthews and others — and Stagg and George were later shown to be innocent.

That may be about to change thanks to the actions of the attorney-general, Dominic Grieve. Not normally a man to cut the figure of a hero — a lean, bookish type, he was last seen filibustering awkwardly in the Commons when the government was under pressure over its links with the Murdochs — Grieve has done something genuinely brave. He has prosecuted the Daily Mirror and the Sun for contempt of court in the Chris Jefferies case, and he has won.

Read the full article at this link.

Nieman: The New York Times and the kitchen table of the future

Leave a reply

The New York Times’ top-floor Research and Development Lab has released a demo video of its latest innovation: a kitchen table. No ordinary kitchen table obviously, it uses Microsoft’s Surface technology to produce a tabletop news consumption experience that departs from the paper’s normal design and layout and has strong social features built in.

See the full demo video below, courtesy of Nieman Journalism Lab, which has a fuller write-up on the table and the New York Times R&D Lab, and transcript of the demo.

New York Times R&D Lab: The kitchen table of the Future from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.

Mashable: Why CNN has acquired iPad magazine Zite

Leave a reply

Mashable has Q&A with CNN’s general manager of digital, KC Estenson, and CEO of Zite Mark Johnson explaining why the broadcaster has acquired the personalised iPad magazine.

Zite, like Flipboard, is an iPad app that allows users to aggregate news articles from feeds including Twitter and Google Reader to create a fully personalised magazine of the content of interest.

CNN announced on it’s blog yesterday that Zite will remain fully independent, a fact Estenson confirms in Mashable’s interview saying Zite will be free to pursue partnerships with other news organisations.

The interview starts by asking “why Zite?”.

Estenson: We saw in Zite a best-in-class product. It’s deeply loved by the people who have it, and we thought it would be a nice addition to our digital portfolio. Secondly, there’s great technology behind it. We’re seeing a lot of interest in this space now, but these guys have been working on this for six years.

Johnson: The iPad is really well suited to reading. I think what’s interesting about Zite is that it brings you really interesting information you might not have otherwise read. It’s not just repackaging information.

We’re seeing Flipboard move into TV and film, while Pulse is getting into bookmarklets and extensions. Where is Zite going next?

Johnson: We still see a huge market in giving you the information most relevant to you. We’re focusing on content right now, news-type content. We really want to focus on giving people a great personalised iPad magazine.

The interview goes on to ask:

Can we expect CNN’s content to feature more prominently on Zite in the future?

Johnson: Absolutely not. Our personalisation algorithms look for most interesting content on the web, whether that comes from CNN or elsewhere. Our algorithms are completely agnostic.

The full Q&A is at this link