Tag Archives: founder

Press agency Deadline reaps online rewards

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“The simple fact was that we had no need of a website. It would have cost thousands of pounds to produce and wouldn’t have made an iota of difference to our business supplying the daily newspapers,” said Scott Douglas, founder of Deadline Press & Picture Agency.

But since setting up a YouTube channel for the agency’s video content and launching a WordPress blog featuring articles in May, Deadline’s online content has shown strong traffic growth.

The site made it into WordPress’ list of the 100 fastest growing blog sites on the platform at 94.

The blog has recorded 21,743 page impressions across 117 posts, while Deadline News TV has attracted 40,221 views for 40 videos as of August 5.

The agency has implemented a solution, harnessing the power of third-party websites, which is low cost, but high impact

“Our blog site immediately plugged a gap by allowing us to showcase our work every day – and reach an audience who may not otherwise see it. Our journalists and photographers still put in the old fashioned legwork to get pictures and stories. It can be frustrating when those are not picked up by the daily newspapers,” said Lauren Crooks, news editor with Deadline.

“Now we can ensure our stories, pictures and video reports will always find an audience.”

Online Journalism India: Moblogging is citizen journalism in India

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This week’s guest is Pramit Singh, blogger on the Indian new media scene and founder of Bighow.com. Continue reading →

Will widgets revolutionise content online?

At yesterday’s AOP forum on widgets, plenty of examples were given as to how these applications are used by content providers, but few answers were given on their impact in terms of audience numbers.

Brand controller at ITV consumer, Richard Waterworth, explained the channel’s creation of Facebook applications to promote ITV2 show ‘The Secret Diary of a Call Girl’, but admitted when questioned that quantifying the contribution these kind of widgets make to audience growth is not yet possible.

“It’s absolutely still true that the power of cross-promotion from ITV on air eclipses all this other activity… the way that Facebook works and these widgets work are not comparable in terms of numbers, but what it’s about is building momentum in certain points of a campaign,” he said.

There is scope then for online news providers to use widgets to build buzz about sections on their sites or current projects – just as US sites Washingtonpost.com and USAToday.com have done.

But with metrics for widgets in their infancy it is unclear when or how these applications could become real audience drivers for news websites rather than just flashy marketing toys.

According to Ivan Pope, founder of Snipperoo, sites including news sites looking to widgetise will have to accept that it is a give and take process:

“In order to aggregate you have to disaggregate something… you have to blow up all your content into small fragments and widgetise everything you’ve got and make it available for people to reaggregate into their own view.

“The era of websites which are controlled by a central entity is coming to an end… people want to be in control of where they exist.”

Such widgetisation of content would be a concern for news providers wanting to track where their content ends up and where their audience comes from. This could cause problems for news sites developing widgets for the mobile web, as David Ashbrook, senior research engineer for Vodafone’s devices team, explains in the clip below:

[audio:http://www.journalism.co.uk/sounds/davidashcroft.mp3]

To iron out these problems more deals are needed between content providers and with mobile networks – events that could lead to, as Snipperoo’s Pope suggests, the fragmentation of the internet and websites as we know it.

New media rank amongst London’s ‘most influential’

Tomorrow the Evening Standard will release its list of the 1,000 most influential people in London – complete with a brand new section devoted to media.

Roy Greenslade has had a sneak preview of the media movers and shakers, and writes that plenty of new media names make the list.

Political blogger Iain Dale, Annelies van den Belt, managing director of ITV Broadband and former Telegraph Media Group director of new media, and Simon Waldman, digital director at The Guardian, all make the 50-strong media list.

Nikesh Arora, Google’s European vice president, founder of the Carphone Warehouse Charles Dunstone and Mark Zuckerberg (not strictly a Londoner, but hey…) , founder of Facebook, make it into the top five.