Tag Archives: Online Journalism

Birmingham student launches hyperlocal site for final year project

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A final year undergraduate from Birmingham City University has set up her own hyperlocal news site for Hednesford, in an attempt to build on the local news currently available and offer more stories focused on the community.

Kellie Maddox, who is studying Media and Communication (Journalism), is running Hednesford News on her own at the moment, as part of a final year project inspired by a number of other start-ups within the hyperlocal field over the last couple of years.

In time she hopes to build up a community of reporters and also work on a business plan to monetise the project.

Currently, the site is not-for-profit for its duration as my final year project but in the future, I do hope to make the site more financially sustainable. There are lots of people, much more knowledgeable than me, trying to come up with business models for these kinds of sites and it’d be great, if between us, we could come up with something. For me, I don’t think I’d ever see the site as a money-maker, what’s more important is the quality and range of content I hope to deliver, that is currently not offered by the limited media in our area. Community engagement is one of my main aims because I feel that many people, who have favoured local newspapers for years, are now not being provided with really relevant content specific to their location. I hope this offers me a chance to do just that.

Read the full Q&A with Maddox on Journalism.co.uk’s TNTJ blog.

OJB: Three things the BBC has done for online journalism

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Three weeks on from the announcement that the BBC would cut 360 jobs as part of a 25 per cent cut to its online budget, Paul Bradshaw looks at three things the corporation has done for online journalism.

1. Web writing style

The BBC’s way of writing for the web has always been a template for good web writing, not least because of the BBC’s experience with having to meet similar challenges with Ceefax – the two shared a content management system and journalists writing for the website would see the first few pars of their content cross-published on Ceefax too.

Even now it is difficult to find an online publisher who writes better for the web.

Full post on Online Journalism Blog at this link.

Clay Shirky: WikiLeaks has created a new media landscape

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Clay Shirky, author and professor at New York University’s interactive telecommunications programme, has contributed to the Guardian’s Comment if Free with an analysis of WikiLeaks’ effect on the media and publishing environment.

WikiLeaks, as my colleague Jay Rosen points out, is a truly transnational media organisation. We have many international media organisations, of course, Havas and the BBC and al-Jazeera, but all of those are still headquartered in one country. WikiLeaks is headquartered on the web; there is no one set of national laws that can be brought to bear on it, nor is there any one national regime that can shut it down

…

WikiLeaks has not been a series of unfortunate events, and Assange is not a magician – he is simply an early and brilliant executor of what is being revealed as a much more general pattern, now spreading.

Full post on Guardian.co.uk at this link.

BBC Internet Blog: Domains earmarked for closure by the end of the year

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The BBC Trust published a report yesterday which revealed that up to 360 posts within BBC Online are to be cut by 2013, as part of a 25 per cent budget reduction within the division.

The Trust’s report included reference to detailed plans to halve the number of ‘top level domains’ (TLDs), e.g. bbc.co.uk/xxx.

Following the announcement managing editor of BBC Online, Ian Hunter, has published a post on the BBC Internet blog outlining progress in the restructure so far, such as decisions on how best to manage legacy content from sites which have become out of date.

You can read more here, where Hunter also provides a useful link to a list of TLDs which are earmarked for closure before the end of the year.

Google due in Spanish court to appeal data protection restrictions

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Google has said that it is due to appear in a Madrid court tomorrow to challenge a demand that it remove links to newspaper articles and official gazettes.

According to the search company, it is to appeal orders by Spain’s Data Protection Agency (AEPD) that it removes links to articles which are the subject of complaints relating to privacy.

Google director of external relations for Europe, Peter Barron published the following statement today:

We are disappointed by the actions of the Spanish privacy regulator. Spanish and European law rightly hold the publisher of the material responsible for its content.

Requiring intermediaries like search engines to censor material published by others would have a profound, chilling effect on free expression without protecting people’s privacy.

The Spanish DPA has not yet responded to a request for comment.

Update:

The Spanish DPA has now responded to our request for comment. It says in cases where a complaint it made and the page hosting the information cannot erase the data because there is a law that protects the publication or a conflict with another fundamental right (freedom of expression), the majority of the AEPD resolutions order search engines to avoid indexing the information of those users as recognition of “the right of the applicants to be forgotten”.

#cablegate: Amazon says WikiLeaks breached terms of service; web address host pulls out

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Following reports that Amazon’s servers had stopped hosting WikiLeaks’ site following its latest release of confidential diplomatic cables, it sought to clarify its position in a statement online.

On the Amazon Web Services site the statement says reports that a government inquiry had prompted it not to serve WikiLeaks any longer are inaccurate. It claimed instead that WikiLeaks had violated parts of its terms of service.

WikiLeaks has responded via its Twitter account.

The BBC also reported this morning that the WikiLeaks website had been shut down by EveryDNS.net, the company providing it with its .org web address.

EveryDNS.net said it had terminated services because WikiLeaks.org had come under massive cyber attacks.

But WikiLeaks has already reappeared using a Swiss web address.

10,000 Words: Four fixable sins of news site design

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For those designing (or redesigning) a news site, this 10,000 Words blog is worth a look. It concentrates on four ‘fixable sins’ of news site design: swamps of share buttons; layers of navigation; avalanches of links; cluttered sidebars.

Let’s be honest: In general, news site design isn’t pretty. I know I’m not the first or last to say it, but I do have a theory about why. It starts off innocently enough — an article, navigation, some ads. But as new tools, gadgets, buttons, widgets, extensions and plugins are introduced to the news consumption scene, that once simple design becomes cluttered with bells and whistles that hold the content hostage.

Full post at this link.

Yahoo rolling out new US local network in beta

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Yahoo has started to roll out a new local product offering dedicated pages of news, events and deals for a number of locations in the US, lostremote.com reported this week.

Beta pages for Yahoo Local have emerged for San Francisco, Brooklyn and Michigan, which can be viewed by city or neighbourhood and feature a list of aggregated posts.

Many of the headlines, especially at the neighborhood level, originate from neighborhood blogs. You can post an event, or sign up with Associated Content to become a paid contributor. “We have launched Yahoo! local in a few neighborhoods and towns to refine the experience while gathering more content for the next set of cities,” explains the site.

Journalism.co.uk reported earlier this week that Yahoo had launched a new contributor network which enables its users to publish content onto its sites, following its acquisition of Associated Content earlier this year.

Alan Rusbridger: ‘Why Twitter matters for media organisations’

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Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger offers 15 things that Twitter does well and why these matter to news organisations. It’s not groundbreaking, but a great summary that any sceptics should be pointed toward.

Including:

  • It has different news values;
  • It’s a fantastic form of marketing;
  • It changes the tone of writing.

Full list on Guardian.co.uk at this link…

The list was given as part of speech delivered by Rusbridger in Sydney last night (or earlier today Australian time):

[W]e journalists find it difficult to look at what’s happening around us and relate it to what we have historically done. Most of these digital upstarts don’t look like media companies. EBay? It buys and sells stuff. Amazon? The same. TripAdvisor? It’s flogging holidays. Facebook? It’s where teenagers post all the stuff that will make them unemployable later in life.

If that’s all we see when we look at those websites then we’re missing the picture. Very early on I forced all senior Guardian editors on to Facebook to understand for themselves how these new ways of creativity and connection worked. EBay can teach us how to handle the kind of reputational and identity issues we’re all coming to terms with our readers. Amazon or TripAdvisor can reveal the power of peer review.

We should understand what Tumblr or Flipboard or Twitter are all about – social media so new they’re not even yet Hollywood blockbusters.

I’ve lost count of the times people – including a surprising number of colleagues in media companies – roll their eyes at the mention of Twitter. “No time for it,” they say. “Inane stuff about what twits are having for breakfast. Nothing to do with the news business.”

Well, yes and no. Inanity – yes, sure, plenty of it. But saying that Twitter has got nothing to do with the news business is about as misguided as you could be.

Read the speech in full at this link…

The Cutline: NYT to bring together print and online in newsroom restructure

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New US media blog The Cutline, from Yahoo’s The Upshot, reported yesterday that the New York Times was restructuring its web newsroom as part of plans to bring together its print and online operations.

According to a memo from executive editor Bill Keller obtained by The Cutline, it was announced internally that digital news editor Jim Roberts will become the assistant managing editor for news, while web newsroom editor Fiona Spruill is named editor for emerging platforms.

Read more on this here…