Today’s story from the Liverpool Daily Post on council staff taking sick leave was the result of a Freedom of Information request made through democracy website www.whatdotheyknow.com.
And how do we know?
Because the source and links to the information released through the FOI request are included at the bottom of the article. A nice touch.
(Thanks to Andy Dickinson for telling us about this)
The Liverpool regional papers, the Liverpool Daily Post and Echo, continue their comprehensive coverage of the Rhys Jones murder trial using Cover It Live technology, which allows the reporter to feed back detailed information about what is happening in the courtroom.
The liveblog of the Rhys Jones trial is currently on standby, but should be going again at 14.30 today. The Rhys Jones coverage can also be viewed together on one page.
For ease of reading back through, it would be good to have the live court coverage more clearly marked with dates and days of trial in the left hand margin next to the times.
On October 9 the Liverpool Daily Post’s editor, Mark Thomas, asked for feedback, but it seems none has been offered.
It’s an impressive feat, which has been going since October 9, and brings up questions of modern day court reporting: it will be interesting to see if it enters the public panel discussion at this week’s POLIS debate at LSE. They’re debating ‘Respect for Contempt: Keeping Speech Free and Trials Fair’.
With a panel that includes Maxine Mawhinney from BBC News 24 as chair, and contributions from Joshua Rozenburg (Legal Affairs Editor, Daily Telegraph), Jonathan Kotler (US Attorney and USC Annenburg School of Journalism), Mark Haslam (partner, BCL Burton Copeland, and Nick Davies (Guardian, author of Flat Earth News), it should make for an interesting set of much-needed discussions.
At last week’s Digital Editors’ Network event in Preston, Trinity Mirror’s new geotagged news maps were a popular topic of conversation.
Launched on the Liverpool Echo and Liverpool Daily Post (LDP) websites, the maps let readers search for news by postcode.
But what information are journalists required to input to make the maps work? and how does this affect their newsgathering?
Alison Gow, deputy editor of the LDP, explained the system to Journalism.co.uk:
“At the moment, every time our reporters create a news story they fill in certain fields which dictate where a story is placed online (e.g. story type, keyword tags, author).
“For stories to appear on the map the reporter simply ensures the new ‘postcode’ field is also completed; they do this by chosing from a vast selection of regional postcodes which are already included in a dropdown menu.”
For stories that could be tagged with multiple postcodes, the primary site of the news, e.g. the accident site in a road crash, is currently being used, though multiple location tagging is being looked into.
“We don’t use them for everything; there would be no point in geotagging Liverpool town hall for every council story, for example. But for location-specific articles they work really well.
“As it grows the map offers greater potential for ‘news from your street’ for readers, and it makes the Post and Echo sites more sticky – people can see markers for stories in their area and this should encourage them to click through and read more,” said Gow.
To develop the project further, the same map format is being looked at for other editorial content, such as business articles, she added.
Any more questions about the journalists involvement with these maps? Leave a comment and hopefully we can get a response.
Trinity Mirror regional titles, Newcastle’s Journal, the Birmingham Post and the Liverpool Post have joined forces to report on the economic situation on this live blog, happening right now, as we type this post.
It’s charting the falling FTSE share index and the Liverpool Daily Post reporter Alison Gow twittered this morning that it is the brainchild of Birmingham Post editor Marc Reeves and the head of regional multimedia David Higgerson.
Its purpose: “to provide live information on breaking news surrounding the banking crisis, as well as informed opinion from our team of experts across the country,” the administrator wrote at 12.19.
The poll shows that 63 per cent of voters think that yes, the government should offer 100 per cent protection on all savings.
At 14.23 Sion Barry of Media Wales writes that the length of of the recession ‘really is the golden question. Some sectors of the economy have been in recession from a while… just ask a housebuilder.’
The papers are using Coveritlive.com to create the blog.
The Liverpool Daily Post is running an online diary today to mark Liverpool’s status as the 2008 European Capital of Culture.
Using online service Dipity, the Post has created an interactive timeline with contributions from readers and its editorial team to capture ‘a day in the life of Liverpool’.
The pictures and text submitted can be plotted and viewed on an interactive timeline or Google map, or browsed by text and images.
The Liverpool Daily Post is using an online survey to quiz readers about their experiences of getting a doctors appointment in the city.
The responses will be used as part of an investigation by the paper into GP services on Merseyside.
The nine-question survey, which has been created using online poll site SurveyMonkey, asks readers to give their location or postcode so information can be compared geographically.
(Thanks to the JP Digital Digest for flagging this up)
The paper has used the survey format to inform regular features in its ‘Make The News’ section and is currently running polls on GSCE and A-Level exams and the local property market.
The Liverpool Daily Post is embarking on a four day liveblog to cover the visit of the Tall Ship to the Mersey using CoveritLive.
Following previous Post experiments with the liveblogging tool, the blog will feature text, images and videos from the event sent by the reporting team.
The paper is also asking readers to submit comments and images by text, and participate in the blog online.
Coverage has started today and will continue till Monday evening.
Norway’s newspaper of record, the Schibsted-owned Aftenposten, is to start webcasting parts of its editorial meetings.
Following of a newspaper debate on media transparency where American regional newspaper Spokesman-Review, which has webcast its editorial meetings since June 2006, was upheld as an ideal in terms of editorial transparency, the paper’s editor-in-chief Hans Erik Matre told attendees it was time to open up more of the editorial process to public view.
“We are considering webcasting our editorial meetings, starting this autumn. However, instances were we broadcast these live online, in full, will probably be limited,” he later told Journalism.co.uk.
“What we have concrete plans for, is publishing parts of our editorial meetings online to get feedback. This could either be to get reader perspectives on the evaluation of our stories, in retrospect, or to involve readers more upfront in the planning stage of big stories – say on healthcare.”
Steve Smith, the editor-in-chief of Spokesman-Review, visited Oslo recently. He told Journalism.co.uk webcasting editorial meetings was a minor programme in the scheme of things for the newspaper, which also use reader polls and journalist-written blogs actively.
“Our webcasts have 40-50 viewers in the morning, 20-25 in the afternoon. It’s mostly our competitors or people who have, or think they might have, a stake in what is being said. We attract few viewers simply because these are boring meetings. It’s symbolic: the fact that it is there, that it is an option, is important. We also break out pieces of the webcast and put them on blogs when we are dealing with controversial issues,” he explained.
He added: “The whole transparency costs next to nothing. The challenge is time: I would much rather spend all my time blogging than being an editor.”
In May, Liverpool Daily Post (LDP) became the first British newspaper to webcast an editorial meeting. Mark Comerford talks to LDP’s editor Mark Thomas about their “transparency” experiments here.
The Hub and Spoke laying out may be in vogue for the majority of those adapting to an integrated newsroom but you’d be hard pressed to call Trinity Mirror’s Liverpool nerve centre anything other than an archipelago.
Alison Gow, deputy editor of Liverpool Daily Post, gave Journalism.co.uk a quick tour and explained how a partially rather than fully integrated newsroom for Liverpool’s Daily Post and Echo newspapers and a portfolio of weeklies served them best.
Similar to other large cities in the UK, Liverpool’s morning paper, the Liverpool Daily Post (typically 15,000 copies circulated per day) and the evening Echo (109,000) serve vastly different markets. To account for this the newsroom has integrated but also demarked areas where each paper’s interest is best served by not mixing processes.
The newsdesks of the Post & Echo had previously been fully integrated but the unsuccessful experiment lasted only 18 months and end in 2001, as it didn’t fully serve the needs each paper had and met with opposition from staff who were resistant to working on the other title.
“I suspect the industry is a lot more broad-minded now as we work across print, internet, TV and radio,” Gow told Journalism.co.uk.
COPY
The dailies and weekly newspapers have adapted and refined a partially integrated newsroom where the two main papers share news copy, but keep diary and features separate.
“A government minister in town would tend to be interviewed by a Post reporter,” Gow told Journalism.co.uk. “That copy would be sent by the Post newsdesk to the Echo newsdesk to be rewritten and subbed down. Echo page leads are around 350, Post 600 plus.
“The Post & Echo share a court reporter but the very distinct target audiences of both papers means what makes a splash in the Echo, gangster trials for example, may struggle to make a page lead in the Post.
“Inquests would be covered by one reporter whose copy would be shared between both papers.
“An exception would be Liverpool council meetings – mostly covered by the council reporters from both papers as it’s a contact-building exercise as much as anything.”
The Echo can also publish stories from the weeklies the day the papers are published, Gow added, as the assistant news editor has access to their content queues.
“It’s a co-operative system and involves the newsdesks, picturedesk and multimedia desks talking to each other. That’s why the command desk is so important,” added Gow.
STAFF
At the centre of the archipelago – the big island – is the command desk where Post and Echo news editors and their deputies sit along with a picture editor who works across both publications and the Echo design editor.
Reporters are title specific, as are the features and sports teams, and both papers have separate features and sports editors and deputy editors, Arts editors and motoring editors.
A multimedia head, working across both titles, also sits on the command desk. As on the web, Gow says, the two publications have ‘more fluid identities’.
Each department desks now has embedded digital journalist. Under the old system ‘they just used to sit in the corner away from everyone else’ said Gow. Now they espouse the need for web content and ensure the website remains an area of focus for each department on each title now that they break 99 per cent of their stories online.
Video is a separate entity altogether – one video journalist is responsible for managing libraries, cutting pieces and training newsroom staff and reporters in video-journalism.
She has trained eight other staff so far, giving them a week’s hands-on training so that they can manage handicams and cut footage. They aim for a new web video each day.
SUBBING
A pool of eight subs work across the Echo, the England and Welsh Daily Posts, Huddersfield Examiner, the Chester Chronicle, the Merseyside and North Wales weekly papers on a rota basis.
There are also title-specific staff who work primarily for each paper – ‘champions’ of each brand, adds Gow.
This approach has shifted subs from thinking they work for a single publication, she said, to a ‘hive-mind’ where they work across several titles.
Trinity Mirror has renamed its icWales website WalesOnline, as part of a ongoing overhaul of its Welsh websites, a press release from the publisher has said.
The editorial focus of the renamed site will remain the same, though new developments around user experience on the site are in the pipeline.
According to Omniture figures, the website attracts over 788,000 unique users per month.
WalesOnline is the latest Trinity Mirror site to move away from the ic portal following similar relaunches for the Birmingham Mail, Liverpool Daily Post and Liverpool Echo and its Scottish titles.