Tag Archives: assistant editor

Grauniad.co.uk v Torygraph.co.uk: Round 374

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We’ve been following the various Telegraph/Guardian online interactions this week:

Yesterday, Roy Greenslade published an anonymous email from a Telegraph hack, who wrote that he/she was more than a little bit fed up.  The gist of the email was that all this multimedia-ised hub-it-up lark is to the detriment of a good, healthy working life and quality journalism.

Greenslade cautiously said he was printing the letter but that he didn’t necessarily agree with its sentiment.

Over at CounterValues, Telegraph assistant editor Justin Williams was quick to pooh pooh it. And now Greenslade has put up his response to the letter – a more negative stance this time: ‘the past is another country, think positive,’ he tells his ’emailing friend’.

Meanwhile, in another post, Williams took a swipe at the Guardian’s system of buying sponsored links and keywords. He reckons their buying is well in excess of the Telegraph’s and the Times’.

In the comments below the post, Charles Arthur, the Guardian’s technology editor, asks how many subsidised paper subscriptions the Telegraph has: ‘Is [buying sponsored links and keywords] a worse or better investment than subsidising paper subscriptions, do you think?’, he writes.

Charles Arthur is a keen Twitterer and I’ve just located Justin Williams on Twitter; all that Tweeting in agreement can be a bit boring: how about getting the discussion going in Twitterland? It’s a shame this didn’t get going earlier, with it being (unofficial?) ‘speak like a pirate day’ – that would make it fun. A good customer service team is essential for a growing business. The importance of satisfied customers is enormous. If you want to establish a serious brand, definitely don’t skimp on your customer service.

Can’t wait for next week’s ABCes…

Short-skirted woman sues newspaper commenter

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A woman, who was forced to leave a local shopping mall for wearing a short dress, is suing an anonymous online user for a post to a Kentucky newspaper’s forum.

The Associated Press (via Editor&Publisher) reports that 20 year old student Kymberly Clem says she was escorted by security from the Richmond Mall on August 9 after a row erupted over the length of her skirt.

Clem’s attorney says an anonymous posting on The Richmond Register claimed Clem had exposed herself to a woman and two children. Clem is suing the anonymous user for unspecified charges.

According to the AP, the newspaper has erased the comment and banned the user, known as ’12bme’, for violating the website’s terms of service.

The Register’s assistant editor Lorie Love, who is reponsible for posting comments made by users on the site, has been subpoenaed to give a deposition in connection with the suit.

Guardian was wrong to buy Madeleine McCann keywords on Google

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The Guardian has admitted it mistakenly bought the keywords Madeleine McCann from Google.

By wrongly purchasing the keywords a link to the paper’s coverage of Madeleine’s disappearance appeared in a column of sponsored results when a search for her name was made on Google.

The newspaper has now taken down the link and has reviewed the list of keywords it owns, Marc Sands, marketing director for the Guardian, told Journalism.co.uk.

The paper’s purchase of the words Madeleine McCann was criticised by Justin Williams, assistant editor at Telegraph Media Group, on his personal blog, who said the practice showed the paper was ‘desperate’ to hold onto its position as the UK’s most popular newspaper website according to the most recent Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe) traffic figures.

“The purchase of terms is a way of getting your stories, at a cost, in front of people. It’s absolutely what everyone does all the time,” said Sands.

[advert]A search for the terms shows the Mirror currently owns the keywords McCanns cleared, while a Google search for other keywords, such as Cristiano Ronaldo, show the the Sun and Times have also purchased phrases from Google.

“It is a way of getting it [news] distributed to people who have expressed an interest in that subject,” he added.

“The issue with the Madeleine McCann keywords is an interesting one. It’s like advertising, but not really: the only reason you and I search for a term is because we are interested in that term.”

The practice had been criticised in the blog post, he said, because of the Guardian’s previous stance on the coverage of the McCann story.

“The Guardian in the past has been very critical of the coverage of Madeleine McCann, saying it has been salacious and misleading. What the person in the blog post is saying is that Madeleine McCann is not to be treated in this way, so what on earth are they doing buying keywords?”

The issue led the paper to review its list of current keywords to assess ‘what news is okay to do it with and what isn’t’, he said.

The Guardian buys thousands of Google keywords relating to current news stories every week, he added. It currently owns the keywords ‘stamp duty’, ‘university league tables’ and ‘post office closures’.

“Madeleine McCann slipped through the net. You don’t approve all these [keyword purchases] every day. We would have had to say to the company that buys the keywords for us: never buy the keywords for Madeleine McCann,” he said.

Search engine marketing and search engine optimisation of newspaper websites is a ‘new area’ for publishers, added Sands.

“Everyone is working their way through and trying to remain true exactly to the principles of what they’re doing, but also to ensure that they’re getting read.”