Tag Archives: Mirror.co.uk

Mirror.co.uk unveils new ‘cleaner’ look

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The Daily Mirror today unveils a new-look website, at mirror.co.uk

Before: how the site looked last week

Mirror Online publisher Matt Kelly says in an introductory post that the “cleaner and less cluttered” design will make better use of photography and video.

Content is organised into seven sections: News, Sport, 3am, Lifestyle, Money, Play and Opinion. Comments are encouraged on stories, and sharing articles has been made easier.

Kelly said:

We constantly improve our website and as much as we believe the new look Mirror Online is a big step forward, we know there’ll be things we haven’t got completely right.

PaidContent has a video interview with Matt Kelly and Mirror managing director Chris Ellis:

Greenslade: Mirror.co.uk on metrics and building loyal online audiences

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Roy Greenslade reports on Daily Mirror associate editor Matt Kelly’s presentation at this week’s World Editors Forum conference in Prague.

Much has already been made of Mirror.co.uk’s decisions to launch separate sites for its main traffic drivers (Mirrorfootball.co.uk and 3am.co.uk) –  in particular the sites’ attitude towards search engine optimisation (or lack of it).

Speaking at the industry event, Kelly challenged the metrics used to measure web traffic:

“According to Kelly, ‘users’ (a sterile description) are people who discover content through Google, devour it, and then return to their search engine to look for more elsewhere,” writes Greenslade.

As a result users car less about the sites they visit and advertisers are less willing to spend cash to attract them, Kelly added.

“Until we bite the bullet and forget about this mad race for users, and focus instead on building engaged, loyal audiences, we will continue to see the value of our content erode online,” said Kelly, who added that slow growth of engaged audiences should be the aim for news groups online.

Full post at this link…

How the news sites are treating the phone tapping story

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Yesterday afternoon in a powerful Guardian exclusive, investigative journalist Nick Davies reported that the Murdoch News Group papers paid £1m to ‘gag’ phone-hacking victims.

Rupert Murdoch, who owns News Group, recently argued he had little influence on his publications’ editorial content; it would be interesting to see how his other UK papers would treat the story about their sister title today.

Let’s see how each of the UK news websites is running the story [as around 9.30 – 10 am]. [News organisations owned by Murdoch are labelled (M).]

Note: Observations correct at time of writing; subject to updates.

  • The BBC has headlined many of its bulletins across radio and TV with the story. Channel 4 ran with the story yesterday. Both news sites feature the story as the main article. Sky News (M) ran it last night and its main (breaking) story on its website is “Cameron: ‘Coulson’s Job Is Safe'”.
  • Guardian: Top story with several supplementary features and stories
  • Sun.co.uk (M): Not running the story
  • NewsoftheWorld.co.uk (M): Not running the story

The Murdoch empire (source: BBC website / News Corp)

NEWS CORP BUSINESSES

HarperCollins
New York Post
Fox News
20th Century Fox
Times and Sunday Times
Sun and News of the World
BSkyB
Star TV
MySpace
Dow Jones Co. (incl. Wall Street Journal)
The London Paper

Australasia:
Daily Telegraph
Fiji Times
Gold Coast Bulletin
Herald Sun
Newsphotos
Newspix
Newstext
NT News
Post-Courier
Sunday Herald Sun
Sunday Mail
Sunday Tasmanian
Sunday Territorian
Sunday Times
The Advertiser
The Australian
The Courier-Mail
The Mercury
The Sunday Mail
The Sunday Telegraph
Weekly Times

Malcolm Coles’ blog post results in changed T&Cs on newspaper linking

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Interesting to see that Malcolm Coles’ recent blog post, which highlighted newspapers’ terms and conditions forbidding linking from their websites, has resulted in some action – outlined in the comments below the post.

Ian Douglas, head of digital production at Telegraph.co.uk says:

“Thanks for pointing this out. As you saw, we deleted it as soon as we heard about it. I’m afraid it say more about the relevance of Ts and Cs than the various papers’ attitude to linking.”

David Black, group director of digital publishing at Trinity Mirror, writes:

“Malcolm, Thanks for spotting this – it’s being fixed for Mirror.co.uk.”

Malcolm Coles has now followed up with another post – what other sites have these kinds of T&Cs banning links to their site? Full post at this link.

Mumbai online: the attacks reported live (updating)

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A look at where the news has unfolded. Please post additional links below. Journalism.co.uk will add in more links as they are spotted.

Washington-based blogger and social media expert, Gaurav Mishra talks to Journalism.co.uk in an interview published on the main page.

One of the few on-the-ground user-generated content examples, Vinu’s Flickr stream (screen grab above). Slide show below:

How it has been reported:

Photography:

  • Flickr users such as Vinu, have uploaded pictures from the scene (images: all rights reserved).
  • A Flickr search such as this one, brings up images from Mumbai, although many are reproduced from a few sources. People have also taken pictures of the television news coverage.
  • But before you re-publish your finds beware: an advanced search which filters pictures by copyright and only shows up images opened up under Creative Commons, limits the results.

Blogs:

Breaking news:

Social Media:

Microblogging:

Mapping:

Video:

  • The Google video seach is here. YouTube videos are mainly limited to broadcast footage, with one user even filming the TV reports, for those without access to live television coverage. YouTube videos seem to be all second-hand broadcasts from mainstream media.

Timelines:

  • Dipity timeline here:

Campaigns / Aid:

https://bmmagazine.co.uk/business/us-government-asks-max-polyakov-to-sell-firefly-shares-for-safety-concerns/

Mirror.co.uk joins competitors with homepage redesign

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Not wanting to be left out following a new look for The Sun’s homepage last Friday, a Telegraph.co.uk redesign and the last stage of the Guardian’s site revamp, Mirror.co.uk began its relaunch on Monday.

Starting with changes to the homepage, the rest of the site will follow suit and new features will be introduced in the coming weeks, an announcement on the site said.

On the homepage a most read/most emailed/highest rated articles box has been added and the left-hand navigation bar done away with. Links to Mirror.co.uk subscription services are neatly lined up across the top of the homepage.

Elsewhere the site’s video player has been upgraded (though the ‘see more videos’ tab opens up another window still), more picture galleries added and the blogs section overhauled with some new additions.

So how does this first stage of redevelopment compare with its competitor’s new looks?

It’s certainly colourful with the addition of multicoloured section headings and if you navigate better with images than this is for you – though personally I find the block of images that dominate the ‘above the fold’ area a tad too busy.

More embedded video, which seems to be happening across the article pages, is a plus, as is the vastly improved ‘below the fold’ on the homepage, which has been tidied up no end.

Mirror.co.uk revamp to add localisation by using Trinity’s locals

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Mirror Group Newspapers digital head Paul Hood wants to add a ‘personalised and localised’ service to the revamp and development of the news Mirror.co.uk site.

Hood revealed details of his digital strategy to NMA. The plan to catch up with rival tabloid newspapers, like the Mail and the Sun, who have shot away in the race of online popularity, is to use the national newspaper site as “a starting point for web usage”.