Tag Archives: guardian

Guardian: Mail’s traffic rise reopens questions about target audiences

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Mail Online last week became the UK national newspaper website receiving the most monthly unique users.

But it gets a lower percentage of its user from the UK than any of the other newspaper websites so says the Media Guardian – gleaning a load of traffic from international celeb news and matching itself against other sites that aren’t just UK newspaper afilliations.

Martin Clarke, Mail Online’s editorial director, told the Guardian: “We’re used to measuring against [other newspapers], but I’m as interested in what Google News, the BBC, or Sky is doing,”

Does this render the ABCe measurement of newspaper against newspaper redundent? As newspapers will be matching different parts of their website against other specialist publications.

While we were away… EveryBlock, LoudounExtra, BBC plans and more

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In case you hadn’t noticed, Journalism.co.uk was in Sweden last week covering the World Association of Newspapers annual conference and the World Editors Forum.

So no one misses out, here’s a round-up of what went down while we were away:

Guardian: BBC ends ‘licence fee’ plans for international news website
The Beeb has dropped proposals for subscription-based access to BBC.com

WSJ.com: Analysis of hyperlocal news site LoudounExtra.com
Following the departure of Rob Curley, chief architect behind the Washington Post spin-off site, WSJ asks if the site has found its audience a year into the project.

Editor&Publisher: 94 newspapers join Yahoo partnership
A total of 779 newspapers now have access to the search engine’s advertising technology and HotJobs ads.

Daily Mail: Sir Ian Blair advocates use of celebrity news videos as evidence in drug trials
Footage, such as the Sun’s infamous Amy Winehouse video and of Kate Moss snorting a white substance, should be presented to the jury in such cases, Blair has said.

Guardian: BBC’s new plans for personalisation of website
Plans to create a new rating, recommendation and personalisation system across bbc.co.uk will be put to the BBC Trust, according to the corporation’s latest programme policy statement.

Editor’s Weblog: Washington Post launches online publishing company
The Slate Group will feature a host of digital titles including Slate and The Root, with additional launches planned.

Telegraph.co.uk: Update on revamp of community blogging platform MyTelegraph
Communities editor Shane Richmond says a relaunch date will be announced by the end of next week.

Matthew Ingram: Globe and Mail removes pay wall
Number of subscribers was not enough to maintain the wall, says Ingram, who works for the paper. Some readers remain unconvinced, he says, pointing out one comment: “You can’t shut us out for a few years and then expect us to come back just because it’s free.”

MediaShift: Everyblock releases first special report
The hyperlocal data and news site has mapped information from a recent Chicago police bribery investigation as part of its first special report.

Guardian publishes string of anti-Telegraph stories – cue spat

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While the Daily Mail allegedly has a gentlemen’s agreement with the Telegraph not to write about each other’s parent company, it hardly seems worth pointing out that no such pact exists between the Guardian and the Telegraph online.

Over the last month a series of articles published by Guardian.co.uk has alleged various problems with or criticised Telegraph.co.uk.

The latest links the MyTelegraph section with the BNP for a second time in little over a week, detailing a blog post on the platform by BNP member Richard Barnbrook entitled ‘Blame the immigrants’.

The Guardian first made the connection between the party and MyTelegraph with an article looking into managing online communities that discussed MyT under the provocative headline ‘Platform for free speech … or hate?’ and went on to say one user ‘publishes BNP campaign literature and flyers’ on the site.

On both occasions the Telegraph emphasised the free speech ethos behind MyT, which is policed by readers who are relied upon to report offensive material.

The policy seems to be working – Barnbrook’s post has attracted over 30 comments including several from the hang ‘um and flog ‘um brigade alongside more measured anti-BNP responses.

MyTelegraph’s problems at the end of last year, as the technology firm behind its development went into administration, were also documented recently by the Guardian:

“Telegraph Media Group’s community media site MyTelegraph ‘is on life support’ until it receives an overhaul this summer, the company’s communities editor said today.

“Shane Richmond told the PPA Magazines 2008 conference that the site had suffered periodic downtime, slow page-loads and instability since the company which built it, Interesource, went in to administration late last year.”

I was there, he did say that, but then again he’d already blogged about it months before.

But then again, again. He DID say it, so it’s fair to report him saying it.

In addition to this last month’s ABCe figures showing that the Telegraph site passed the Guardian for the first time to become the UK’s most popular newspaper website in terms of unique users, seem only to have fanned the competitive fire.

The Guardian was the first to delve into the Telegraph’s recent rapid growth in unique users – from 12,283,835 in February to 17,036,081 in March, and 18,646,112 in April – suggesting a switch in internal measurement tools may have prompted the surge.

Continuing the series of pieces on the Telegraph’s online traffic – and there are a few of them now – the Guardian suggests that a review of online traffic measurement announced by JICWEBS last week was sparked by publishers concerns over the Telegraph’s recent growth.

All fair news pieces from the Guardian? Surely there can be no complaint with their reporting factual news? Well, yes there can.

After the publication of the latest Guardian piece today, Telegraph communities editor Shane Richmond came out fighting, accusing the Guardian of hypocrisy and arguing that if the charge leveled at the Telegraph is one of giving a platform to racists and fanatics then it is a charge that could well be applied to the Guardian’s Comment is Free blog.

“How about we take the view that when you have an open platform, whether it’s My Telegraph, Comment Is Free, or the internet itself, then you have to accept that a multiplicity of views will be expressed on it and that some of those views will be unpalatable to some people,” he wrote.

“If the Guardian’s attacks on our site are motivated by genuine concern, then they should look closer to home first. However, I suspect that this sustained criticism has more to do with sour grapes over recent audience trends.”

Stories about other publishers are fair game and healthy competition between the titles is to be encouraged.

But take the BNP stories and the numerous stories about the Telegraph’s web advances en masse and one may begin to wonder when healthy news reporting begins to border on the obsessive?

UPDATE – the ‘debate’ continues with a post from Shane Richmond in response to a comment left by Comment is Free editor Matt Seaton on his Telegraph.co.uk blog

Guardian most popular newspaper website in UK, according to Nielsen Online

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Some significant differences between the figures for unique users visiting UK newspaper sites released by Nielsen Online today and those announced by the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe) last week.

While both rank the Guardian as the most popular in the UK, Nielsen’s figures suggest the site attracted 3 million unique users in the UK in April compared to 7,762,826 recorded by the ABCe.

The Telegraph attracted 2.7 million UK uniques in April, according to Nielsen – around 3.5 million less than the figure reported by the ABCe.

By the Nielsen figures the Sun attracted 1.9 million UK unique users, the Times 1.8 million and the Daily Mail 1.7 million over the same period.

Nielsen calculates its traffic figures using a panel-based method called NetView, which the company describes as ‘around 45,000 UK internet users who have opted in to download a meter which records all their PC, online and application usage on a continual and ongoing basis.’

In contrast, websites register themselves with the ABCe, which then audits data on web traffic recorded by the sites.

Very different methods – very different results.

Interestingly Nielsen also provides data on the ‘engagement’ of UK unique users with a site, differentiating between ‘heavy’ (>15 minutes), ‘medium'(>5 – >=15 minutes) and ‘light'(<=5 minutes) users.

The results of this analysis suggest the most popular online newspapers – the Guardian and Telegraph – have the highest percentage of light visitors (with 83%and 81% respectively).

The results for engagement in full:

Sun: 14% heavy, 16% medium, 70% light
Times: 13% heavy, 17% medium, 70% light
Daily Mail: 12% heavy, 14% medium,75% light
Telegraph: 7% heavy, 12% medium, 81% light
Guardian: 6% heavy, 11% medium, 83% light

The figures suggest that the Times is the only title to have gained in ‘heavy’ users since January 2008, while the Telegraph has recorded the biggest increase in ‘light’ users over the same period.

As Stephen Brooks, UK managing director for Nielsen Online, pointed out in the release: “Analysing the Telegraph’s audience by heavy, medium and light visitors reveals their dramatic growth in popularity is concentrated around light users, which could be due to the site’s improved visibility in search results,”

“This encapsulates the ‘reach vs engagement’ conundrum that newspaper sites face – is the best path to financial success attracting the most visitors or having a smaller core of more engaged users?”

Media Guardian: Anti-immigrant BNP member blogging on Telegraph

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Richard Barnbrook, the British National Party’s London Assembly member, has used the paper’s MyTelegraph platform to publish an anti-immigrant blog post.

A spokeswoman for the Telegraph said the presence of the post on the site did not mean the paper endorsed Barnbrook’s arguments and that readers are relied upon to report offensive material.

“Our readers are entitled to their opinions and, within the law, they’re entitled to publish them on the My Telegraph blogging platform,” she said.

Three spheres of relevance for news online

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Today’s a good day to point at three examples of how you can enhance the value of online news by linking it to additional, meaningful and relevant content.

I’m calling them the Three Spheres of relevance, three different approaches to creating news relevance: locally on a news site by bringing related content to a single destination, by using tagged metadata to enable better linking to relevant material and in the newsgathering process itself (stick with me, this might get into seriously tenuous segue territory).

Thomson Reuters has launched a new version of its semantic tagging tool Open Calais that broadly enhances and builds on its first round of development (hat tip Martin Stabe).

Open Calais has made publicly accessible a piece of internal software used by Thompson Reuters that automatically reads content and creates relationships between different articles, news pieces and reports based on the businesses, places, events, organisations and individuals mentioned in them.

External developers have been encouraged to play with the technology to create an additional level of metadata for their own sites that could offer users a more sophisticated level of additional content around news pieces and blog posts by relying on automatically generated semantic links rather than more rudimentary manual or algorithmically created versions.

The second round of development two has brought WordPress plugins and new modules for Drupal to allow developers to more easily integrate metadata into the applications and third-party tools they are building.

As part of round two, Thomson Reuters has also launched Calais Tagaroo, a WordPress plugin that automatically generates suggested tags for bloggers that want to incorporate additional relevant content to their posts.

This weekend has also seen the launch of New York Times’ Olympics blog, Rings, as a destination where readers can get a plethora of Times content about the Beijing games. The blog is the latest edition to the Times’ Olympics sub-site.

In addition to covering the sporting competition the blog – like the Times’ sub-site – draws in reporting from Times’ sports, foreign and business desks, as well as taking pieces from bureaux in China.

Compare this with the Olympics destination the BBC is running for the games. It could easily draw sporting coverage together with relevant material from the news pages but it has chosen not to make that link and instead leave its users to drift off elsewhere to find out about the other issues surrounding the games. It doesn’t make the most of pulling all the relevant and related material togther in the way the Times does with its blogs and sub-site.

The final example of news organisations working on relevance comes before any of that content is even written.

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger told the Press Gazette that as part of the newspaper’s adoption of an integrated print and digital news production process reporting staff would abandon the traditional newsdesk structure to instead ape the set-up of Guardian.co.uk reporting staff and be rearranged into subject-specific teams or ‘pods’ to allow closer working between reporters and the ability file for both the web and the print edition as the story demands.

Guardian review of MyTelegraph is ‘out of touch with internet age’

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Speaking in a blog post of Friday, Shane Richmond, communities editor of Telegraph.co.uk, explained that staff from the Guardian had been putting questions to users of MyTelegraph in preparation for an article about the blogging site.

To pre-empt the attack article, Richmond posted the answers to the questions asked of the site, which covered alleged links between MyT and BNP propaganda and Enoch Powell, while also asking for examples of the best blog posts contributed.

“To me, the tone they strike is politically correct and out of touch with the internet age. The internet encourages free speech, has lower barriers to entry and places greater onus on individuals to decide for themselves what is acceptable. Is it the case that Comment Is Free only within Guardian-approved limitations?” wrote Richmond.

The aforementioned article, published today by MediaGuardian, compares and contrasts MyT with the Guardian’s own Comment Is Free platform and the Sun’s MySun.

“A cursory glance reveals that while it has some powerful and well-written blogs, My Telegraph is also inhabited by some very unsavoury characters. . . Such comments appear on all websites, the Guardian included. The difference with My Telegraph and similar sites overseas is that the newspaper is providing the platform for others to start the debate. On most comment sites, bloggers sanctioned by the newspaper group typically do so,” it reads.

While it’s interesting to consider the different approaches taken to moderation and user-generated content by the Telegraph and the Guardian, in the spirit of open debate on the subject, wouldn’t it be worth mentioning the Guardian’s recent debacle with one of its ‘sanctioned’ bloggers? The debate started by this blogger, wasn’t allowed to continue – I wonder if this would have been the case if the post had appeared on MyT.

Press Gazette: Rusbridger says integration of Guardian and Observer will ‘unlock creativity’ of staff

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The independence of the Guardian’s three national titles – Guardian.co.uk, Observer and Guardian in print – will not be compromised by the integration of the news production process across the titles, editor Alan Rusbridger told the Press Gazette.

Rusbridger claimed that combining the titles would ‘unlock the creativity’ of his staff but that the distinct voices of each title would remain. Senior editors met with staff last week to discuss the future of the newspapers as it integrates its production processes.

Guardian: Thomson Reuters axes 140 journalist jobs

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News and information company Thomson Reuters has confirmed that it is cutting 140 journalist posts by the end of the year.

According to the Guardian, head of news David Schlesinger wrote an internal email which explained that areas of “natural overlap and duplication in coverage” existed between the two companies and that as a result jobs would go.

The cuts, which will take place later in the year, are expected mostly to be of editorial staff in Europe.

Guardian: Times website seeks Sky News link-up

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The Times website wants to carry more video content from Sky News.

Times Online editor-in-chief, Anne Spackman, told MediaGuardian.co.uk that negotiations to make this happen were at an early stage on the newspaper website carrying breaking news videos from Sky.

Any deal is likely to improve the online video offering from the Times.

Despite being one of the first national newspapers to adopt a TV service the Times offering has fallen behind other nationals – in terms of quality – and seems to be due an overhaul.