Tag Archives: Madeleine McCann

Journalism.co.uk top 10 blog posts in 2007

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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.

@BtPW: 120,000 contributions and 3 million views of single Madeleine McCann story thread

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Danny Dagan, head of online communities with News Group, told the Beyond the Printed Word conference that a single discussion thread about Madeleine McCann overseen by his moderation team has taken over 120,000 contributions and been viewed over three million times.

Attesting to the success of News Group’s reader community areas, Dagan – whose team of seven moderators and one manager oversee the communities for Sun Online, thelondonpaper and the News of the World – told delegates that he had developed a 152-page moderation policy book that his team is tested on every three months (bonuses depend on knowledge of it, he added.)

The policy is to assure the smooth running of the reader discussion area and to lessen the threat of legal action from rouge posts and when discussions turn ugly.

As an example, Dagan said that when the tide of opinion turned against the McCanns his team were removing up to 500 comments a day.

The policy book was developed, he said, from the responses News Group’s team of lawyers to 100 ‘borderline’ pieces of user-generated content (UGC) submitted to its newspaper sites.

Industry norms, he added, of having to remove a piece of unsuitable content within 24 weekday hours were massively surpassed.

He told delegates that his team was committed to removing unsuitable content within 15 minutes. Although, he added, the average time between complaint and removal was two to three minutes.

He added that moderation was made for both inappropriate content and from an editorial perspective, also for ‘brand protection’ (which basically means if the Sun, the moderators or Rupert Murdoch get slagged off too much).

So heavy traffic and a fabulous number of users of MySun then Danny? Oh yes, but he remained steadfastly tight-lipped on just how many people had signed up.