Tag Archives: PDA

PDA: Telegraph.co.uk will chase channels not web traffic, says digital editor

Leave a reply

Telegraph.co.uk will move away from chasing high reader numbers online to focusing on “content, commerce and clubs”, says Edward Roussel, digital editor at the Telegraph, in this interview with PDA.

With the realisation that high web traffic figures does not guarantee a sustainable business model, Roussel says the focus will now be on developing channels. Part of this will be the work of Project Euston, the Telegraph’s new digital entrepreneurial unit led by Will Lewis, which has now been up and running for three weeks.

Euston is not a private club where only certain people can operate. It is designed openly. We have done it so that any one of our over 500 journalists who has a brilliant idea can apply for funding and other resource, and try to make it a reality.

The channel strategy will focus on creating content and commercial opportunities, such as shops and clubs, around niche areas and PDA picks up on the site’s existing gardening section, which carries a shop and drives readers to buy.

While there are opportunities to charge for access to certain areas, such as crosswords, by setting up clubs, Roussel adds that there are no immediate plans in place to go behind a universal paywall.

Full post at this link…

Business Insider: Chart of the Day – 24% of US newspapers don’t use digital delivery platforms

Leave a reply

Courtesy of Silicon Alley Insider’s ‘Business Insider’, a chart showing that 24 per cent of US newspapers do not use any digital delivery platforms to spread their online content.

“The American Press Institute asked 2,400 newspaper executives if their papers ‘provide access to stories or information such as sports scores, headlines, stock quotes, etc.,’ via Twitter, Facebook, Email alerts, Mobile/PDA, YouTube, Kindle, Flickr, e-readers, etc., and told them to ‘check all that apply.'”

24 per cent of all respondents answered ‘None at this time’.

Business Insider post at this link…

Journalism Daily: Indico News, confessional journalism and the Observer’s future

1 Reply

Journalism.co.uk is trialling a new service via the Editors’ Blog: a daily round-up of all the content published on the Journalism.co.uk site.

We hope you’ll find it useful as a quick digest of what’s gone on during the day (similar to our e-newsletter) and to check that you haven’t missed a posting.

We’ll be testing it out for a couple of weeks, so you can subscribe to the feed for the Journalism Daily here.

Let us know what you think – all feedback much appreciated.

News and features

Ed’s picks

Tip of the Day

#FollowJourn

On the Editors’ Blog

PDA: Journalists and developers join forces for Guardian Hack Day 2

Leave a reply

Nice round-up from Kevin Anderson on the projects created at the Guardian’s second Hack Day – an event to see ‘what journalists and developers could come up with in just a day’.

Projects included:

  • a visualisation of swine flu news – showing the number of news stories compared with outbreak areas that had received less coverage
  • creating Google gadgets for individual Guardian sections
  • an iPhone app alerting users to Guardian events and helping them find their way their with Google maps

Idea-inspiring stuff.

Full post at this link…

PDA: Chris Anderson on free vs freemium

Leave a reply

Kevin Anderson has a nice round-up of US Wired’s editor Chris Anderson’s recent trip to the Guardian’s office, during which the author of soon to be released book ‘Free’, gave his views on charging for online news.

Publishers will need to grow their offerings and should look at building communities around content, according to Chris Anderson.

“One of Wired’s sister publications at Condé Nast, Golf Digest, is thinking about creating a club tied to the magazine. Members could get exclusive lessons or discounted access to courses. Thinking out loud, Anderson said: ‘If Wired was a club, what would that entail?’,” reports PDA.

Anderson also believes people are more likely to pay for relevance than quality.

Full post at this link…

Fallout from Jarvis’ ‘perfection vs beta culture’ post

1 Reply

Jay Rosen, said that yesterday’s New York Times’ piece on the ‘truth-be-damned approach’ of Tech blogging ‘did not bother’ him.

Not so for fellow NY journalism professor, Jeff Jarvis. His Buzzmachine post on ‘Product v. process journalism: The myth of perfection v. beta culture’ is currently doing the link rounds and has sparked a number of debates. For example:

  • A Twitter row between Jarvis and the editor of the Sunday Business section of New York Times, Tim O’Brien: Blogger here; MSM here.
  • A response from the Guardian’s Tech editor Charles Arthur, in regards to a criticism of UK tech reporting. One commenter, Wessell van Rensberg, remarked underneath Jarvis’ post: “I live in the UK and the Guardian’s weekly tech edition is paltry in terms of its tech coverage. Both in terms of scope and quality.”

Arthur responds:

“Flattered, I’m sure. Haven’t noticed your name in the letters pointing out what you think we should be covering; don’t know if you’ve commented on our many blogs (Tech, Games, PDA) that cover tech. We do have lots of insightful commenters (which I think is what you mean instead of ‘commentators’.)

“Hard to know quite what you want. For instance: TCrunch says Apple is going to buy Twitter. As soon as possible I point out, on the Guardian blog, why that’s absolutely not happening. It turns out it isn’t happening. Which is more useful?

“And I’ll also point out that when TCrunch does get it wrong, such as on Last.fm ‘passing data to the RIAA’ – a story denied by all sides, where it would be illegal for Last to pass the data (UK data protection act forbids) – TC deletes comments pointing that out. Do you really trust it?”

Now, might there be room for a response on that point? Come on, TechCrunch fight your corner!

Journalism.co.uk is quite enjoying its ringside view, but – on a side point – is there a neater way of viewing Twitter debates, than the links suggested by Jay Rosen?

PDA: B2B ‘news marketplace’ launches for UK

Leave a reply

Beamups, a website where news organisations and producers can sell unused or archived footage, has launched in the UK.

The site launched in beta in the Middle East in April and has established deals with the BBC, Al Jazeera and ABC.

Content is sold with 40 per cent of the fee going to Beamups.

Full post at this link…

Andrew Bagguley hired as consultant for Guardian mobile drive

2 Replies

Former head of mobile strategy for News International (NI), Andrew Bagguley has been hired as a consultant for Guardian News&Media (GNM), as the title begins its move into the mobile market.

Bagguley left NI in August following a reorganisation of the publisher’s digital arm. He helped The Sun and News of the World launch mobile websites and implement QR codes for mobile advertising.

After two years at NI Bagguley has just started at GNM, a spokeswoman for the group confirmed to Journalism.co.uk.

“We want to benefit from his experience launching mobile for News International so he’ll be working closely with our in house teams to formulate our plans,” she said.

GNM currently offers news alerts via text message and a version of Guardian.co.uk for PDA, SmartPhone and BlackBerry devices.

Guardian blogs complete move to new technology platform

6 Replies

Guardian.co.uk is in the process of moving the rest of its blogs to its new R2 platform, an update from the title’s own insider blog reports.

From tomorrow the site’s remaining 23 blogs will join the first phase of blogs, which made the switch last month, and will sport a new design and improved tools for commenting.

Titles making the change tomorrow include the technology blog, arts blog and PDA, which says comments will be turned off on the moving blogs between 4pm and 9pm (BST).

The key features of the new blog design are:

  • Keywords linking blog posts to related content across the site
  • The relocation of blogs to their relevant sections – e.g. the politics blog in the politics channel
  • Blogs now share features introduced across the rest of the redesigned site, including the option to share posts by Digg, del.icio.us etc, and a widget showing the most-linked to Guardian content
  • Blog posts are included in the site’s search
  • Commenters can have their own user profiles

As previously reported on this blog, the new features were trialled on the site’s Comment Is Free platform and use social media firm Pluck’s commenting technology.

Analysis of the upgrade is already coming in: Shiny Media co-founder Ashley Norris says the move ‘signals the end of the organisation using a traditional blogging approach’.

The new design, says Norris, gives readers only a brief view of the intro to a blog post on a section homepage.

“To read the story users have to click through to the page. The reason the Guardian has done this is that being less generous means more click throughs, more page views per users and subsequently more ad impressions served,” he points out.