Tag Archives: London

Press Gazette: Latest Trinity Mirror relaunch includes hyperlocal community features

Trinity Mirror has relaunch the website of West London’s Hounslow Chronicle.

The new site includes hyperlocal community features – pioneered by Trinity’s Teesside Gazette – for areas of Hounslow, Feltham, Isleworth and Brentford.

Online Journalism Scandinavia: Metro Sweden’s deal with Schibsted part of its ‘Freesheets 2.0′ strategy

Norwegian media giant Schibsted this morning announced that it’s paying £30m to take a 35 per cent stake in the Swedish edition of Metro International’s free newspaper.

In what is a key freesheet market the former rivals have forged a partnership to collaborate on advertising sales with the new company offering advertisers the chance to reach 4.2 million readers across the Metro and Schibsted paid-for dailies Aftonbladet and Dagbladet.

In February, Metro International CEO, Per Mikael Jensen, discussed his company’s strategic goals with Journalism.co.uk saying that consolidation and online innovation would be key for the development of his newspapers, in what he called the ‘freesheet 2.0 phase.’

“We are entering a freesheet 2.0 phase where we are consolidating our core business and looking at more ways to attract readers,” said Jensen, who succeeded Pelle Törnberg as head of Metro in 2007.

In Sweden, this consolidation will mean Schibsted will stop publication of its free paper Punkt SE with immediate effect so that the new joint venture can focus print advertising around a single free title.

The deal has similarities with the one Metro struck at the end of 2007, when it sold 60 per cent of its Czech operation to its competitor Mafra.

The freesheet giant is currently undergoing a strategic review, and when Journalism.co.uk spoke to him, Jensen said we could expect more deals of this nature.

Today, Jensen refused to rule out further consolidations when questioned by Danish media and said he expected dramatic changes in the Danish newspaper market in the coming months (but refused to go into details).

“We do not just sit there and wait for the strategic review to be completed, but implement strategy from day to day. Strategy is something we evaluate each month. Those who believe the strategic review we now are in the middle of will become some sort of bible, will be disappointed,” said Jensen in the interview with Journalism.co.uk.

In addition, Metro is looking to attract more readers online. It’s launching new versions of its websites in all its markets – it recently launched online for the first time in France – and will consolidate some of its editorial activities by creating an internal news agency in London which will serve all its editions.

Jensen is behind Metro’s new developments and alliances but he remains as pessimistic as ever about the future of paid-for printed newspapers.

“I would be very surprised if more than 25 per cent of today’s paid-for newspapers exist in ten years. Of the newspapers that will survive, many of them will be published online only, or make its paper edition free,” Jensen said.

The two newspaper giants may have forged a partnership in Sweden but they remain embroiled in a head-to-head competition over their market leading freesheets in France and Spain.

However, Metro International still has a lot of work to do to convince investors that its business model – the company is still loss-making even though it narrowed its first quarter net loss to £5.1 m – has a profitable future.

BBC London uses YouTube for mayoral questions

Another news organisation getting in on the online act for next month’s London mayoral elections is the BBC with their BBC London election channel on YouTube.

London residents were asked to post video questions to candidates Boris Johnson, Brian Paddick and Ken Livingstone (not sure why the other parties aren’t included). A selection of these will be put to the runners as part of BBC London’s broadcast coverage this week – the first interview with Ken Livingstone airing tonight at 6:30pm on BBC1.

Here’s a video introduction to the project from BBC London:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTrDqQ4ZNZY]

Innovations in Journalism – live geo-tagged video broadcast from Seero

We give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on. Today, live video streamed over the web with extra geographical information mapped in real-time from Seero.

image of seero’s website

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
Hello, I’m Justin Cutillo, co-founder of Seero. It’s a geo-broadcasting platform that fuses live and on-demand video with GPS mapping.

Our technology is a response to the convergence and proliferation of video and GPS features in the flourishing mobile device market.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
Seero was built to reflect the core needs of video bloggers and online journalist. The platform incorporates tools for live mobile broadcasting with additional real-time GPS tracking and static location marking.

We also have a geo-information/advertising server. This system allows us to geo-tag specific information to enhance any broadcasts near that location.

For example, if an online journalist was covering a fire in London, we have the ability to upload facts specific to the building and geo-tag them to the exact location. The information is served based on its proximity to the location of the broadcast.

All you need for mobile broadcasting is a laptop and a mobile broadband card. You can add on an inexpensive GPS receiver for the real-time tracking feature or use an Ultra Mobile PC is you don’t want to carry around a full laptop.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
We are currently working on some major build items. We should be releasing an embeddable flash player that includes the live video player and the full map functionality within a month. We are also working on a module to add course tracking to previously recorded videos.

Our largest project is to build a mobile broadcasting application for Symbian mobile phones to enable journalist to broadcast live video and GPS right from their Nokia phones.

Beyond that we have a secretive project that could really redefine how people interact with live video on the internet.

4) Why are you doing this?
When it comes down to it we are technology buffs. We came up with the idea on a vacation to San Francisco more than two years ago while thinking of ways to virtually tour a city.

Combining live video and location info opens up new, exciting uses for online video.  Needless to say we are very enthusiastic about the prospects.

5) What does it cost to use it?
Besides the hardware cost, which may be very little if you already have a laptop, the service is completely free to all users.

6) How will you make it pay?
We currently envision three main channels of revenue. The first channel involves white label sites built on the Seero infrastructure for promotional as well as professional and government services.

The second channel is geo-advertising. We have a proprietary geo-advertising system that provides a simple and powerful solution for correlating advertising to site content.

Beyond those revenue streams we also see potential for our geo-advertising system as a stand-alone service.

CNET Business Technology Awards open for nominations

Entry is now open to online publisher CNET UK‘s Business Technology Awards.

The 17 award categories include IT team of the year, technology marketing campaign of the year and technology innovation of the year

Entrants can register online – the deadline for entries is May 30.

The winners will be announced at a ceremony in London on September 23.

Round-up: London Mayor candidates get web-savvy

So Brian Paddick started twittering and then the candidates lined up for an online grilling on Yoosk – but it hasn’t stopped there.

The Sun hosted an hour-long web chat with Boris Johnson yesterday, who answered questions from MySun readers. The answers to his questions are now on the Sun’s forums and have been edited into a couple of short video clips for the site. Brian Paddick will take part in a web chat on the site on April 25 at 1pm.

Elsewhere, Johnson fared less well with new media coverage: a mobile citizen journalist on the Evening Standard’s website captured the Conservative candidate admitting his plans to replace bendy buses in the capital would cost £100 million.

The Standard is running an interactive section covering the campaigns. The YouVote channel has been set up for users to submit images, video clips and comments and given today’s scoop, seems to be doing a good job.

Messy Media officially launches Glitterditch – a blog about all things London

image of glitterditch blog

After its ever so soft launch, Messy Media has officially introduced Glitterditch, a new blog about all things London.

MessyMedia co-managing director Lloyd Shepherd said: “Glitterditch isn’t just another ‘what’s on’ title. It’s about the immense, teeming great fishbowl of London.

“We want to reflect the reality of living in London, through the eyes of a young and talented team of bloggers who eat, sleep and breathe the capital.”

Telegraph creates mash-up map of London murders

Following news of the murder of 14-year-old Amro Elbadawi in London, the Telegraph has plotted figures of murders in the capital last year on a Google map to show their location and frequency by borough.

Screenshot of Telegraph map of London murders in 2007

The map gives an at-a-glance overview of the 26 teenagers murdered in London in 2007 and complements the text article, though it would be useful to have more of the information referred to in the piece included on the map – e.g. Metropolitan Police stats on the ethnic origin of last year’s victims.

The Manchester Evening News’ murder map of fatalities since 1999 develops the idea further with images of the victims and links to background articles.

Somalian press gets web presence

A website dedicated to coverage of Somali print and online media has launched.

Somali Press Review claims to be the first website to highlight the work of the Somali press, both online and print media.

The London-based website features reviews of Somali news, opinions from selected Somali websites, a summary of some Somali language commentators and feeds from agencies and global new publications featuring Somalia.

Journalism.co.uk top 10 blog posts in 2007

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).

  1. @BtPW: 120,000 contributions and 3 million views of single Madeleine McCann story thread
  2. Breaking news coverage on Twitter of fire in east London
  3. Outsourcing newspaper interaction on Topix
  4. Amazon Kindle – would you want to pull that out of your bag?
  5. What’s the Drudge Report worth?
  6. NY Times.com slide shows generate 7 per cent of page views
  7. New BBC homepage
  8. The Scotsman’s new website – will it be the destination Scotland needs?
  9. The NUJ and new media – what’s all the fuss about?
  10. Citizen experts not citizen journalists?

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.