A new online service from the Financial Times is advertising for editors and writers to join them from across the globe.
FT Tilt, which will launch later this year, says on its landing page that it will provide “a similar blend of lively news and analysis for a specialist audience of finance professionals”.
The FT won’t discuss the project publicly just yet, but confirmed they are currently recruiting journalists as well as user interface engineers to work on the new site.
The project is being led by the same team that developed FT Alphaville, the company’s successful financial blog.
UPDATE (May 12) – The session with Keith McSpurren will kick off at 1pm tomorrow – if you’re attending it’s in Room AG03 ground floor, College Building, City university – that’s 280 St John St, London EC1 (map here)
Liveblogging – the format of choice for news sites to cover events it would seem given recent examples.
Next week its founder Keith McSpurren is in the UK and will be coming to City University in London to talk about the good, the bad and the potential for liveblogging and news.
This is an informal and free event, from 1pm next this Wednesday (May 13).
Today’s budget announcement is being billed as the most significant of recent times given the UK’s current financial woes.
This is both a breaking news story, but one that requires closer analysis and follow up – and, perhaps most importantly, the ability to make it relevant to the reader.
So how are news organisations covering it online and who’s ticking these boxes?
In addition there’s a nice ‘What to expect’ guide breaking down the issues that are likely to feature in the budget announcement.
FT.com
Arguably the go-to site for budget coverage given its specialism, the FT is building on tried and trusted features from last year (a budget day podcast, video analysis, a budget calculator) with a new liveblog from 12pm covering Alistair Darling’s speech, editor Robert Shrimsley, who will participate, told Journalism.co.uk.
The format is based on the site’s MarketsLive feature successfully developed and used by its Alphaville blog. As such it will ‘bring people people up to speed, but inform them in an entertaining way’. Financial analysis but entertaining – two styles that rarely meet, said Shrimsley, but that will be key to FT.com’s liveblogging of the budget.
“There’s a premium on getting that information out and telling people what its means. We feel at the FT that we have the right people to pass on that analysis,” explained Shrimsley.
There will be a Twitter feed too, but it’s crucial not spam people with updates, he added. Readers are encouraged to participate in both this stream and the liveblog though.
Alphaville isn’t being used as a lab for experimenting with new ways of coverage, he stressed, but there is potential for more liveblogging across the site. It’s important not to overdose on technology, however, but to use only when applicable, he added.
“Can we offer our audience what is worth reading? There’s lots of innovation on the internet and there’s lots that you can do – that doesn’t mean you have to,” he said.
Channel 4 News website
More use of Twitter by the Channel 4 news team – as introduced by presenter Krishnan Guru-Murphy in the vid below:
Liveblogging at regional level
Deciphering what the budget means for the average news reader is being tackled head on by the Newcastle Evening Chronicle with a liveblog taking place across a number of Trinity Mirror centres.
“We’ll be mainly trying to digest it for *normal* people with rx [reactions] from experts, rather than the scary £180bn debt figures,” said Colin George, multimedia editor, in a Twitter update.
UK regional titles will compete against nationals for this year’s electronic news site and best use of new media prizes at the 2009 Newspaper Awards, according to the full listings on HoldtheFrontPage.co.uk.
Websites for the Belfast Telegraph and Kent Messenger’s Kent Online will go head-head-head with BBC.co.uk, FT.com, Guardian.co.uk, Telegraph.co.uk and Times Online in the news site category.
Candidates for best use of new media include Exeter’s Express&Echo for Kellow’s Bootlaces, FT.com’s Alphaville and the Henley Standard website.
Also of note – the award dedicated to: ‘Most Significant Contribution to Future Newspaper Success’, for which the nominees are:
Cambridge News – Video content
Crain’s Manchester Business
FT Weekend – Re-design
Guardian & Observer – Subscriber project
ncjmedia – Northumberland strategy
ncjmedia – Rising Stars
Elsewhere the International Newspaper Award is dominated by German representatives, with the Augsburger Allgemeine, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung and the Nordkurier all nominated.
The awards are run in cooperation with Fujifilm and the Production Journal celebrating the crème de la crème in newspaper and news media production. The winners will be announced at ceremony on April 22 in London Hilton.
Sadly, Journalism.co.uk can’t report back on the exact nature of the Long Room … we did try and sneak in this morning but this has just pinged back:
“Thank you for your application to join FT Alphaville’s Long Room. We regret to inform you that your application has been unsuccessful, as you don’t appear to meet our strict criteria for membership.”
We’re told we can try again if our situation changes. Ho hum. Looks like we’ll be gazing in the windows of the old boys’ club for a while, from the cold and snowy outside. We’d chosen a little profile cartoon and everything.
We did know we weren’t exactly qualified, but our multimedia curiousity got the better of us. To be fair, we probably have don’t have much to take to the online financial ‘table’.
We’ll just have to make do with Markets Live for now.
Tomorrow between 3-4pm BST (10-11am EST and 7-8am PST) journalists Sam Jones and Stacy-Marie Ishmael issue will be answering questions from users live.
Meanwhile headlinemoney.co.uk, a financial news site, is expanding its free services to general news reporters as they are ‘increasingly covering money-related stories’, a press release from the site says.
Journalists can sign up for special guest passes to the site, which offers a case study request facility, a financial release news wire, background information on financial instutions, and a directory of financial journalists for editors looking to make commissions.
The offer is very much a way to meet the demands of the current economic situation, a spokeswoman for the site told us:
“With no obvious end in sight to the global financial crisis, we are happy to extend the offer for at least a month, or until the end of the year, if the demand for our resource remains high amongst non-financial journalists.
“On the duration front, again, it’s a case of regularly monitoring the situation. Once use of the headlinemoney site by a generalist reporter begins to fall away, then we will be inclined to think it’s a case of job done and will probably switch off access privileges. Those with guest passes can always reapply further down the line if the need should arise again.”
The need for editors is greater now in the online age than ever, according to BBC broadcaster and all-round media mogul Andrew Neil.
Speaking at the SIIA Global Information Industry Summit, Neil said the internet had created a world in which the reader is ‘information rich, but quality poor’.
“What we need are trusted gatekeepers to decide what is accurate and what isn’t,” he said, adding that news requires ‘a good old-fashioned editorial process’ and a ‘trusted brand name’.
But this process cannot be replaced by blogs: “I will still enjoy them [blogs] as a form of entertainment or print journalism pornography.”
Discussing Coffee House, Neil claimed the site attracts 200,000 unique users and 2 million page impressions a month. The site will soon account for 20 per cent of the Spectator’s ‘bottom line’, he added.
Blogs also came under scrutiny from Hugo Dixon, editor-in-chief of BreakingViews.com, who said that in terms of financial news trusted media brands are demanded by readers.
“There are some good things on blogs, but they don’t have the brand consistency of media brands. Brand matters, because financial professionals do not have the time to hunt: they need to no where someone’s coming from, the ethical basis, and does it have good access [to news and information]. I think very few blogs have good access.”
Dixon made a convincing case for the need for quality journalism online and how this can drive subscription-based revenue models and help editorial staff gain access to subjects and clients.
The Financial Times’ news team was unable to update its website for several hours this morning after thieves stole computer equipment from Cable & Wireless’ data centre at Watford.
The site’s Alphaville blogged ran live updates on the situation and published stories while the main site was out of action.
