Tag Archives: guardian

The Guardian launches science blogs network

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The Guardian is launching a new science blogs network to get readers discussing and debating all aspects of the science world, from palaeontology to extraterrestrial life.

This is another step in the Guardian’s strategy to set up partnerships with bloggers, following in the footsteps of its recently launched law network.

The science network will comprise of four regular bloggers sharing their expertise on the latest in evolution and ecology, politics and campaigns, skepticism and particle physics. A fifth blog will act as a window into other discussions going on in the science world and will also host the Guardian’s first science blog festival.

The festival will showcase a new blogger every day and aims to put newbies at ease by offering lots of new places to start reading. The web world is buzzing with thousands of science enthusiasts sharing their knowledge and thoughts, but it can be very overwhelming for those not familiar with it, explains the introductory post from Alok Jha, a science and environment correspondent at the Guardian.

Readers can also share any posts that especially excite (or infuriate) them by using the Guardian’s WordPress plugin that allows bloggers to republish articles on their own sites.

Jobs round-up: Mobile moves and digital appointments at Guardian and Telegraph

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It seems there’s a certain amount of musical chairs going on this summer in the digital departments of the UK’s news organisations.

paidContent:UK reports that Torsten de Riese, Guardian News & Media’s mobile business manager for the past seven months, is departing for a digital director role at CNBC.

Meanwhile, Telegraph Media Group head of mobile, Maani Safa, has left the publisher. According to NMA, Safa’s replacement is Mark Challinor.

The Guardian has also announced a series of moves amongst its multimedia and digital teams: in September head of audio Matt Wells will become blogs editor; while current news editor Stuart Millar will become web news editor, responsible for live and breaking news coverage on the website.

Chinese news site praised for publishing global content gets back online

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The editorsweblog.com has a post from Stefanie Churnow looking at the latest developments on a Chinese website called yeeyan.org – a news site made up of content translated from English in an attempt to help pull down the language barrier thrown up by the globalisation of journalism.

The site itself has been running since 2006 and has 150,000 registered users according to Nieman Journalism Lab, inviting translators to enable the movement of news from one language to the next.

Yeeyan focuses on the social aspect of its mission over quality of content. Users are highly encouraged to interact with the site and have their own profile which shows their statistics of their involvement on Yeeyan. People can recommend articles for translation, or they can attempt to translate an article themselves.

Commenting on the site’s success so far, Churnow says the significance is the support it provides to global journalism and offers a model for the future.

With the globalization of journalism, the need to translate different news sources into a variety of language is growing. The Paris based Courrier International is an established leader in this trend, translating articles from all over the world into French. Yet the Yeeyan community is an example of how it is possible to build cultural and language bridges at a cheaper rate than what is offered by conventional translating methods. Yeeyan may be replicated in the future to provide community based translating systems across many different languages. The drawback though is you get what you pay for; the communities are essentially free to sustain, but this social aspect to Yeeyan means that translation is not necessarily to a professional standard.

Last year it was shut down for several months following a partnership venture with the Guardian Media Group and was suffering from server problems earlier today, but these have now been corrected.

See the full post here…

David Mitchell breaks ranks to question Guardian paywall stance

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As the Times and Sunday Times’ paywalls went up earlier this month, the Guardian welcomed a former Times blogger and readers to its website with some cheeky editorial.

The Times has done the same with columnists from the paper writing and blogging about their support for paid content. But interesting space on Comment is Free on Sunday was given over to some-time Guardian writer and comedian David Mitchell, who took the title’s strategy to task:

By implying that it thinks content should be free for moral reasons, the Guardian website is playing an extremely dangerous game. It’s an approach which not only makes it hypocritical to charge for the printed newspaper and the iPhone app, but also gives hostages to fortune: what if the Murdoch paywall, or some other “micropayment” system, starts to work? Are we to believe that the Guardian wouldn’t institute something similar? Or would it be happy to be reduced to the online equivalent of a freesheet?

Full post on Comment is Free at this link…

Guardian.co.uk: Gaurav Mishra on digital activism

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Ahead of  its Activiate 2010 conference, the Guardian has published a Q&A with Gaurav Mishra, CEO of 2020 Social. Mishra, who helps build and grow online communities, talks about some interesting projects and sites with which he has been involved:

In the first paradigm of digital activism, you work with a disadvantaged group that suffers from limited access to even the most basic information and tools for self-expression. So, you use simple-to-use digital devices like Nokia mobile phones and Flip video cameras and simple-to-use digital technologies like text messages and online video to enable them to access basic information and share their own stories. Frontline SMS, Ushahidi, Freedom Fone and Video Volunteers are good examples of the ’empowering with information’ paradigm of digital activism. Mini Skirt Step Mom Seduces Son full porn free video online

In the second paradigm of digital activism, you work with a group that is anything but disadvantaged. This group is at ease with using always on internet and mobile devices, both for instantaneous access to information and for self-expression and social interaction. Here, the digital activist isn’t trying to solve a crisis of capability, but a crisis of caring. Here, the aim is not to empower with information, but to engage with inspiration. Move On and iJanaagraha are examples of the ‘engaging with inspiration’ paradigm of digital activism.

Full post at this link…

Developer’s ‘easy to browse’ version of the Guardian

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Developer Phil Gyford has created a rather nice website featuring the day’s Guardian, using the publication’s open content API: http://guardian.gyford.com/

His aim? To make it “as easy to browse through today’s newspaper as it would be with the print edition”.

Gyford writes on his blog about creating better online reading, addressing issues of ‘Friction’; ‘Readability’ and ‘Finishability’.

Full post at this link…

Guardian reprimanded by readers for comments on Cumbria shootings liveblog

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Commenters on Guardian.co.uk’s liveblog covering the shootings in Whitehaven today challenged the site over its decision to publish comments on the blow-by-blow coverage.

The liveblog, a format which has been used to good effect by the Guardian previously, particularly for its G20 coverage and Andrew Sparrow’s election coverage, has been aggregating news coverage of the events as they unfold and updating with police information and eyewitness statements.

But commenters have taken the site to task for leaving the blog open to readers and asking for comments and information to be posted in the comments section:

I think having a comment section on this is pretty ghoulish and in bad-taste (…) Best just to let the truth come out properly instead of this rolling, almost certainly erroneous way of doing things.

Yes, as earlier commenters have said, please switch the comments off. It is legitimate – and might even help save lives – for the media to seek minute-by-minute updates from people there and quickly broadcast any information that is relevant. But it does not have to be public.

Fortunately, and to the site’s credit, editor Janine Gibson stepped in with this comment:

There are very good technical reasons to cover a fast unfolding story in this way, which are nothing to do with turning into Fox News but are to do with speed of publishing and being able to correct things quickly.

However, we’ve discussed it and think the bulk of commenters are correct, it’s not a particularly useful way to source information on a story such as this, so we will turn the comments off.

Thanks to those who raised it constructively.

(Hat tip – @jonslattery)

Communicate.ae: Digital experiments at the Guardian – successes and failures

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From earlier last month this Q&A with Mark Finney, head of client sales at Guardian News & Media, in which Finney explains some of the digital ‘experiments’ that have worked for the group and some that haven’t:

Guardian 24 allowed you to download stories scraped from our sites automatically over a number of different areas, and print them as a PDF. It was our way of trying to enter the London free newspaper market but get our readers to pay for the paper and the ink and not have to pay for distribution. It was an interesting thing to do, but it didn’t really work. Not many people did it.

Finney says the Guardian’s iPhone app experiment is paying off: “£250,000 is not going to change the face of newspapers, but it’s 100,000 people who have chosen to pay for an optimised version of my content.”

And on paywalls and registration models for Guardian.co.uk:

[Y]ou could pay for an ad-free version. It was a long time ago that we binned it. It was about £25 to £30 per year. We got something in the order of 2,000 or 3,000 people who did it. Only 2,000 or 3,000 people a year were prepared to pay £25 or £30 for an ad-free version of the Guardian, proving how little resistance to advertising there is.

Full post at this link…

Founder Rafat Ali quits paidContent and Content Next

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Founder of ContentNext, the publisher of digital media news site paidContent.org, Rafat Ali has announced he will leave the company in early July.

ContentNext, which also publishes paidContent:UK, mocoNews,net and contentSutra.com, was bought by Guardian News & Media in July 2008. The deal marked the next step in GNM’s US expansion plans, the group said at the time. But in a farewell post on paidContent.org, Ali hints at the difficulties of moving from start-up to big media ownership:

The last two years under Guardian have been illuminating, to say the least. Being part of a big company brings its own level of complexities; during a huge financial crisis, it makes for a roller-coaster ride. The high of the sale dissipated quickly, and pulling back and hunkering down isn’t fun, much less entrepreneurial. To Guardian’s credit, amidst the mothership’s own perfect storm, they stood by us, and we have survived, though much smaller.

I am leaving the company while the editorial is still at the peak of its reputation, even though we are half the team we used to be. It really is a miracle. And the edit leadership under our ME Ernie Sander and my longtime partner-in-crime and co-editor Staci D Kramer gets the full credit for it, as do our scrappy group of talented journalists. The business side is a rebuild-in-process that I hope Guardian continues to support in kind and spirit.

The sites will continue under managing editor Ernie Sander.

Full post at this link…

#wmf: Guardian will target international audiences as ‘untapped business’

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Global audiences are an untapped business opportunity for the Guardian, Steve Folwell, Guardian Media Group director of strategy, told a Westminster Media Forum gathering on ‘The Future of News Media’ today.

According to the last Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe), 65 per cent of traffic to Guardian.co.uk in March came from outside of the UK. Revenue generated by UK and non-UK audiences does not break down the same way, but the figure points to “significant opportunities from global audiences”, he said.

Editorially-speaking the Guardian launched an American spin-off site in 2007. But according to Editor & Publisher the venture was due to cut six staff last year, the site’s separate homepage was axed and its content was brought back under Guardian.co.uk’s US channel, suggesting that international business expansion might not be matched by editorial launches overseas.

There is a crossover between GMG’s approach editorially and its business model, however, said Folwell. The group is not interested in short-term profits, but in fundamentally changing its business model, he said. In particular the new opportunities that new devices, platforms and technology provide for distributing journalism and making money will be full explored – developments yet to come such as a Guardian presence on IPTV, for example, and the newly launched commercial side to its data and development service, Open Platform.

Technology has always been on the side of journalism. It has radically increased it’s reach, it’s immediacy (…) But all is not rosy in this garden and it’s a fair question to ask if this brave new age of journalism can be sustained economically?

Technology is certainly not on the side of those who want to preserve the status quo. You either hang on to the old bus models for as long as you can (…); or you can make a more fundamental change to your bus model. In taking the latter route it obviously helps hugely to have strong owners with strong balance sheets.