Tag Archives: Ashley Norris

#FollowJourn: @shinyashley/social media entrepreneur

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#FollowJourn: Ashley Norris

Who? Co-founder and executive director of Shiny Media, PR agency Shiny Red and website publisher Anorak.

What? Also contributes to TechDigest.tv. His Twitter updates are a great source of interesting links to social media, journalism and digital industry news.

Where? Visit his website.

Contact? @shinyashley.

Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips every day, we’re recommending journalists to follow online too. They might be from any sector of the industry: please send suggestions (you can nominate yourself) to judith or laura [at] journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.

The Shiny Media story: what’s going on?

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Since news broke that Shiny Media had gone into adminstration, Journalism.co.uk has been trying to gather more information – especially in regards to the details of the new buyer. Unfortunately, calls and emails to its remaining founder Chris Price have gone unanswered. We’ve called the administrators, Wilson Field, and they promise to keep us posted if a statement is put out.

  • Also at at Telegraph.co.uk: Why Brightstation Venture’s Dan Wagner is fighting the Shiny Media administration.

We have not been able to reach Price’s co-founder Ashley Norris, who left the company last year. The other co-founder, Katie Lee, has provided some information via her Twitter feed and in the comments on paidContent, and now she’s provided even fuller detail about her experiences at Shiny for a blog post on Telegraph.co.uk.

We hope to post more news soon.

Trust 2.0 – reports of MJ’s death are not greatly exaggerated

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It was fascinating to watch the Michael Jackson rumours hit Twitter late last night (BST) and the mixed reaction to the initial TMZ.com report. An AOL/Telepictures Productions entertainment news site and renowned for having its finger on the pulse, but not quite big or well-known enough to risk the re-tweet or the MSM endorsement? Should we trust it, should we not? The links and telling tweets are reproduced here:

TMZ.com breaks news of the death first:

“We’ve just learned Michael Jackson has died. He was 50.”

mj2

Many journalists were playing it safe, even with their own personal tweets. Even the ‘semi-journalists’:

Then… a few comments about the weird news culture we live in. Compare the way you heard about Princess Diana to this, for example. This from Meg Pickard, the Guardian’s head of social media development:

But were people being unduly cautious? Ashley Norris – of Shiny Media fame – offered this:

The Sun (by an unnamed ‘online reporter but it has now been updated and by-lined) and the Metro (by a by-lined reporter but the link is now dead) – and others too no doubt – tentatively go with ‘reportedly dead.’ And actually attributed TMZ. Then, phew, a mainstream media source finally gives us likely sources to cling onto. The LA Times.

latimes

Around 23.35 BST (22.35 GMT):The BBC goes for it on TV. In its special breaking television news report on BBC1 after BBC Question Time, and before This Week, they say that Jackson is reported to be dead: citing the LA Times as the main source, then TMZ.com, and then add that the Associated Press is also reporting the death.

Now everyone’s sure that he is dead. The Guardian gets this wonderfully comprehensive tribute article up very quickly (23.26 BST).

TMZ were the winners of the night with publicity all round. Check out the quote from Alan Citron, founding manager for TMZ but who now works for Buzz Media in an email to Beet TV last night:

“TMZ has drifted into a lot of juvenile satire lately, but Harvey’s [Levin, managing editor of TMZ] still the best when it comes to serious celebrity news reporting. It’s highly likely that TMZ will own this story.”

This lovely tweet from @PJButta says it all:

More views on TMZ and trust on Twitter.

As for the print? According to Paul McNally,

One more link-to-print here: the Guardian’s newspaper front page slideshow (presumably a later edition for the Sun).

What have we left out? Leave links and comments below, if you’ve got anything to add.

Talking to (Shiny)Katie post-Shiny: ‘Shiny can turn things around’

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Last week saw co-founder Katie Lee aka ‘ShinyKatie’ leave Shiny Media, a departure she announced on Twitter.

shinykatie

As TechCrunch reported, only one of the three original staff members is left, Chris Price. Shiny Media first launched in 2003, with its site TechDigest and then rapidly expanded and in 2007 received $4.5 million VC funding from Brightstation. By 2008 they had six main Shiny categories which split into different sites – 30 in total.

Things didn’t look so bleak for Lee in September last year when Lee discussed her plans for redesign with Journalism.co.uk. But even without Lee, Shiny is still going ahead with plans. This week saw the launch of TechDigest’s new look –  with a ‘new user friendly format’, Chris Price told Journalism.co.uk.

Last Friday, was Lee’s last day as ShinyKatie. She spoke to Journalism.co.uk about Shiny and her plans for the future.

What is the situation for the company now? It seems the 30 blog titles are being maintained, but is this realistic?
[KL] “Many of the sites in our network are key to the deal we have with Glam, and they certainly won’t be closing. In terms of other sites, all I know is that traffic is Shiny Media’s biggest success story and Chris and his team will be working hard to make sure sites aren’t shut down unless they absolutely have to be.”

How do you feel about it? Did things get resolved amicably? Or will you be speaking out like [other co-founder] Ashley Norris?
“Obviously I’m absolutely gutted not to be working with such a talented, brilliant and (most importantly) funny editorial team. I have no plans on ‘speaking out because’ my team left behind in Shiny Media deserve to do well, deserve my respect and deserve the chance to continue doing their job without hindrance from me.

“It’s important to say that Ashley wasn’t in our office working full time for a very long time before that article was written. In fact, while he was working as a freelancer up until it was announced he’d left, we hadn’t seen in him in the office for months and as far as most of the staff were concerned, he hadn’t been a part of Shiny for some considerable time. I think the impression was that he’d been CEO up until it was announced he’d left, but that isn’t the case.”

It’s obviously sad to read about the plight an independent venture that seemed to be going so well: looking back can you see where some things went wrong?
“It’s still a successful network with some good advertising deals in place – such as the Vodafone Live Guy campaign we recently worked on, and a brilliant partnership with the Gadget Show Live.

“In terms of where we went wrong, we’ve certainly made some pretty big mistakes over the years, but with no model to follow over here, I think Shiny is still a pretty impressive success story. I wish we’d sorted out the commercial side of the business from the beginning rather than relying on advertising agencies to sell what are very bespoke advertising campaigns, but we finally have a sales team in house and they’re already making great strides forward.”

You’re still a shareholder – do you still have hope the company can turn things around?
“I certainly do still hope the company can turn things around, yes! I love Shiny Media, love the sites, and love the people that work there. It’s really important to me that the sites keep going. Shiny Shiny was my site that I started when I was 25, and the thought of it not existing anymore is something I can’t ever imagine. I know that Gemma feels the same about the fashion sites, especially Catwalk Queen. And if there was no TV Scoop I wouldn’t be able to geekout on Being Human reviews and the like!”

What are your plans now?
“I’ve got some ideas that have been bubbling away quietly in the back of my mind for some time now. I’m going to take a bit of time to work out which to focus on and where to take it and while I’m doing that I’ll keep myself ticking over with a bit of freelance consultancy and some journalism. I won’t be looking for venture capital funding – I’m more interested in starting small, keeping things simple and satisfying a few creative urges along the way. One idea in particular I’ve been dying to work on for a while now, so I’ve got plenty to think about!”

Guardian blogs complete move to new technology platform

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Guardian.co.uk is in the process of moving the rest of its blogs to its new R2 platform, an update from the title’s own insider blog reports.

From tomorrow the site’s remaining 23 blogs will join the first phase of blogs, which made the switch last month, and will sport a new design and improved tools for commenting.

Titles making the change tomorrow include the technology blog, arts blog and PDA, which says comments will be turned off on the moving blogs between 4pm and 9pm (BST).

The key features of the new blog design are:

  • Keywords linking blog posts to related content across the site
  • The relocation of blogs to their relevant sections – e.g. the politics blog in the politics channel
  • Blogs now share features introduced across the rest of the redesigned site, including the option to share posts by Digg, del.icio.us etc, and a widget showing the most-linked to Guardian content
  • Blog posts are included in the site’s search
  • Commenters can have their own user profiles

As previously reported on this blog, the new features were trialled on the site’s Comment Is Free platform and use social media firm Pluck’s commenting technology.

Analysis of the upgrade is already coming in: Shiny Media co-founder Ashley Norris says the move ‘signals the end of the organisation using a traditional blogging approach’.

The new design, says Norris, gives readers only a brief view of the intro to a blog post on a section homepage.

“To read the story users have to click through to the page. The reason the Guardian has done this is that being less generous means more click throughs, more page views per users and subsequently more ad impressions served,” he points out.

Shiny Media co-founder Ashley Norris steps down

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Five years after co-founding Shiny Media, creative director Ashley Norris is leaving the blog publisher.

Norris will remain ‘a significant shareholder’ in Shiny, he said in a blog post announcing his departure, and will work as a consultant for PR arm Shiny Red.

Future plans involve developing some new web projects and working with other start-ups, he said.

Read Journalism.co.uk’s interview with Ashley Norris on the growth of Shiny Media’s blogs.

Two views on the future of blogging UK – granular quantity or ‘quality’ big blogs

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The British blogosphere had an ripple of excitement last week with the launch of Messy Media‘s first offering – Westmonster.

In interview with Journalism.co.uk developers Lloyd Shepherd and Andrew Levy talked about their strategy for launching, what they hope, will be a relatively small number of ‘high quality’ blogs ‘that appeal to a mass audience’.

And up their sleeves? A worker-centric blog about the City, blogs on motoring and journalism, as well as a celebrity title written for ‘people with a brain’.

They want big audience, US style (and bigger advertising returns – no doubt?). Can it work like that? They say they want to win the audience with ‘quality’ rather than quantity.

But can a popular, eyeball-heavy blog just be quality without the quantity?

Ashley Norris, co-founder of Shiny Media, told Journalism.co.uk that Shiny was a ‘mini content factory‘ continually producing a mix of content – news, opinion, and extra background material – in a bid to keep readers coming back to the site, again and again, during the day.

And it’s a strategy he thinks has still got legs, saying there is still huge potential to launch niche blogs in the UK, building large audiences through multiple publications, as more and more leisure pursuits find an outlet on the web.

“There is a massive opportunity, part of me thinks that at the moment we should just continue to churn out blog after blog after blog in different verticals, because virtually every time we have done it, after a time it has reached a point where it’s getting a significant amount of UK traffic and interest from UK advertisers.”