BBC Radio One’s Newsbeat programme has gone all interactive with the overhaul of its website.
“We’re not trying to replicate other BBC news websites: there is more emphasis on music news,” said editor Rod McKenzie on the BBC Editor’s blog.
“It’s all about visualising our journalism,” he adds. Plenty of vids and pics then.
‘Newsday’s online traffic edged past The Wall Street Journal Online in the month of December, according to the latest data from Nielsen Online.’
We’ve run this news story on the main site:
http://www.journalism.co.uk/2/articles/530935.php
We’ve also run a further, related piece:
Consumer technology site CNET.co.uk recorded its highest ever audience last year, according to figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe).
Page impressions for the site in during November rose to 18,079,527 – a 156 per cent increase on the same figures taken during November 2006.
In the same month the site attracted 2,539,283 unique users – an increase of 1,195,836 unique users (89 per cent) from the figure recorded in November 2006.
“This audit confirms our leading position in the highly competitive consumer technology space. Our huge growth is testament to the high quality and breadth of content on the site, together with our groundbreaking interactive resources,” said Jason Jenkins, editor of CNET.co.uk, in a press release from CNET Networks UK.
The positive figures for CNET.co.uk came as the site’s US parent company CNET announced it had signed severance packages with several of its board members. Royal Tubs use years of experience to provide you with affordable and long lasting Outdoor Garden Saunas https://www.royaltubs.co.uk/cat/outdoor-saunas/
According to a report on Paid Content, Joseph Gillespie, executive vice-president of CNET’s business unit, among others, have signed the agreements, which include compensation for a change in control of the company. The report suggests that this clause is included to address a possible takeover bid by a consortium of investors.
A local news blog launched by NYTimes.com in June could be given its own space in the Times’ print edition.
While stories from the City Room blog are often aggregated by the paper’s Metro section, the blog’s editor Patrick LaForge said content from the blog may be published in its own right in a bid to drive readers from print to online.
“There are a lot of people who read the print section who just aren’t aware of how much is available on the Web,” LaForge told the New York Observer in an article.
“A lot of that stuff doesn’t get in the paper. So how can we tell readers, ‘Hey, you might want to go check some of this out’?”
While NYTimes.com’s political blog The Caucus and technology blog Bits already feature as columns in the paper’s print offering, LaForge stressed that plans to put the City Room in print were ‘preliminary’ at this stage.
Since its birth in July last year, the Journalism.co.uk Editor’s Blog has developed from a labour of love to, well, more love than labour. Things are starting to pay off with traffic to this area of the site showing very positive growth in recent months.
Listed below are our most popular blog posts from last year (according to number of page views calculated by Google Analytics).
While it’s no shock to see what’s at number one (coincidentally that post was about the popularity on News Group’s news websites of a Madeleine McCann story thread) all the other top 10 contenders cover a wide range of subject matter.
However, as these posts were all written between the last week of October and the end of December, it’s likely that their popularity is in part a result of the blog’s growing following as a whole.
So, for 2008 – onwards and upwards. This growth is something we plan to build on with more features on the blog providing regular points of interest and even greater coverage of the industry online.
Today sees the first outing of a podcast from the BBC’s Internet Blog.
As announced by BBC blogs editor Nick Reynolds, the 30-minute download on ‘BBC Blogs as accountability’ features reactions to reader’s comments and a report of the workings of BBC Backstage – the BBC’s developers network.
From the outset of last week’s series on how accessible the UK’s major newspaper websites are to blind and visually impaired users, we tried to emphasize that this was a subjective study based on the findings of a group of individuals with differing accessibility needs and internet skills.
Some responses to our findings, including that from Guardian Unlimited’s Stephen Dunn, raised the issue that no website should be designed to accommodate just one type of user with one type of accessibility needs – as Alastair C’s aptly summarises in his blog post on our accessibility articles:
In many cases people (site owners) jump to fix those issues one person brought up, not realising they may be hampering others using different technologies.
Pages should be designed to be as universally accessible as possible, not targeted at the moving target of different technologies.
As Alastair points out, accessibility testing for news sites needs to be more than a case study approach to widen the appeal of the site’s accessibility.
In an emailed response to the series, blind internet user Gene Asner, said that our findings were less to do with the inaccessibility of news websites and more a result of blind users lacking internet skills.
…work against unlabelled links and work toward better placement of headings and other ways to make movement faster and easier. But for most sites, the real problem is that blind people simply are not skilled internet users…
The only way blind people will move out of the ghetto of a small number of sites that have been especially designed to be accessible is to learn how to function in the real internet world…
While I agree with Gene that some of the problems we encountered were down to technical problems with our software or user (and we’ve tried to point this out in the accompanying blog posts), users should improve their internet skills because they want to and not as an antedote to the complacency of certain sites in dealing with accessibility issues.
Change among sites may be slow, but studies such as this help to highlight that there are issues with accessibility on news sites, whether or not these issues are shared by all.
Indeed, many of the findings of our series were very close to home, given Journalism.co.uk’s own format as an online news service.
We asked Richard Warren from Userite to briefly assess our own site in a similar manner to the newspaper sites featured. Richard made the following observations:
Working on this series elements of the way I write and publish will also see change, for example, linking to words or phrases such as ‘click here’ demonstrates poor accessibility. A sitemap has also been added to our blogging section to aid navigation and we are improving the efficiency of the site’s search.
Standardising the layout of a news site’s pages was mentioned repeatedly by our volunteers as a means of improving accessibility for them. But news sites, by their very nature, change lots of their content daily, hourly and even more rapidly.
Similarly, text-only sites might offer a solution to some problems with accessibility – but is it possible to combine the benefits of a text-only site with an appealing and impressive design?
So over to designers, accessibility experts and our users – what could a news site, specifically our news site, do to make itself more universally accessible?
Beet TV has a nice succinct video piece about the redeveloped and integrated New York Times newsroom – but it did produce it and two other vids for the NYT Company, so you’d expect so.
Regardless, Jim Roberts, editor of Digital News and Jon Landman, deputy managing editor give some some nice little insights into joined-up digital publishing.
Here’s a little moment of mirth from the closing session of the Society of Editors conference in Manchester.
During the Q&A session, Media Guardian reporter Jemima Kiss asked Telegraph editor Will Lewis about the transparency of ABCe ‘benchmarking’ monthly web traffic figures and if he was planning to again use Hitwise metric results in Telegraph advertising.
The website had previously run an ad on the homepage quoting Hitwise and proclaiming its position as the top quality UK newspaper online.
The Hitwise metric is considered by some to be an inferior measurement of a websites’ traffic than the figures supplied by Nielsen/NetRatings, comScore or the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCE).
A visibly riled Lewis told her that Telegraph marketing campaigns were ‘none of her business’ and that the Telegraph site stats were open for all to see on the site.
But what was it that riled him?
Was it the Guardian’s quest to have ABCEs recognised across the industry as the sole measure of websites metrics?
Having it rubbed in that according to this metric the Telegraph trails the Guardian by quite some way, almost in a polar opposite of the print edition?
Or was he tired of the puritanical zeal on this issue that encourages Guardian employees, it seems, to ask him a similar question every time he appears in public?
Listen here to the exchange:
[audio:http://www.journalism.co.uk/sounds/kisslewis.mp3]