Brian Harrison, Telegraph Media Group’s digital director, said yesterday that the group “is in the early stages of developing an e-commerce project to place links to sites like Amazon.co.uk alongside Telegraph.co.uk stories in a bid to replace some of the revenue lost from the declining interest in print ads and the slow-down in online display advertising,” PaidContent reports. Full story…
Deal for journalists at UK’s Telegraph group secures pay rise for three years. Full release at this link.
This appeared in the search result for news about Iraqi journalist Muntazer al-Zaidi, in the second of Journalism.co.uk’s bizarre Google stumblings today (first here). Fluff cleverly hidden in the international grit…?
“You get the day off work. You feel entitled to go to the pub at opening time and stay there. And people, for the first time in ages, seem actively interested in what you’re up to,” says Leith, who was made redundant from his role as the Telegraph’s literary editor on Tuesday.
Little did the architects behind the office/hotel complex at the heart of the Nixon affair (doesn’t sound right does it?) know what an impact the building’s name would have on the British media.
It’s a legacy which has given British newspaper journalists an easy way to coin a name for the latest ‘scandal’ (scandal defined in its broadest sense: we have Flakegate, after all).
But when it comes to last week’s BBC outrage no-one seems to know which gate to stick with:
Media Guardian alone refers to Sachsgate, Granddaughtergate and Manuelgate.
We’ve seen Rossgate from the Telegraph, Brandgate from the Independent. For readers’ sake, since the coverage really doesn’t seem to be letting up, let’s have an agreed gate.
And some consistency please: should the named gate namesake be the perpetrators, or the victims of the ‘scandal’? That particular detail often bothers me: we’ve had Queengate, but also Cherie and Camillagate (Nipplegate of Justin Timberlake fame is a particular favourite).
Reuters and most of the papers/blogs are going with Manuelgate but my vote’s with ‘whatnewanglecanwepossiblytakenowgate’ (she says, fully aware of the irony as she pens her own tenuous angle for this blog post).
Mainly because Rossgate could lead to confusion for the poor pupils at this school in Hemel Hempstead.
Any gates on this particular story I’ve missed? For those that care and are thinking of writing their Masters thesis on the subject, there’s actually a Wikipedia page dedicated to ‘scandal-gates’ (which actually already lists Manuelgate, fyi).
Publishers using user-generated content (UGC) are not simply going for the cheap option, Neil McIntosh, head of editorial development at Guardian.co.uk, told the audience at last night’s New Media Knowledge (NMK) ‘What happens to newspapers?’ event.
McIntosh was responding to suggestions made by the National Union of Journalists’ (NUJ) Tim Gopsill that publishers were using more UGC to reduce costs.
“UGC is not cheap. It’s many things, but it’s not cheap. It’s extremely expensive to nurture it and to make it something worthwhile. My heart sinks when I hear the union saying that journalists are going to be replaced with UGC,” said McIntosh.
Costs of publishing UGC, such as photos and comments, rapidly and training staff to moderate and contribute to discussions online are often overlooked in the debate over whether publishers should be using it, he added.
Speaking specifically about the Guardian’s new belief channel on its Comment is Free (CiF) platform, McIntosh said that without proper moderation and nurturing, the paper ‘might as well be lighting the blue touch paper and running’.
When interacting with UGC, in particular comments, blog posts and CiF submissions, it is about ‘encouraging journalists to write the kind of things that kickstart a debate in the right direction’, he said.
Some significant differences between the figures for unique users visiting UK newspaper sites released by Nielsen Online today and those announced by the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe) last week.
While both rank the Guardian as the most popular in the UK, Nielsen’s figures suggest the site attracted 3 million unique users in the UK in April compared to 7,762,826 recorded by the ABCe.
The Telegraph attracted 2.7 million UK uniques in April, according to Nielsen – around 3.5 million less than the figure reported by the ABCe.
By the Nielsen figures the Sun attracted 1.9 million UK unique users, the Times 1.8 million and the Daily Mail 1.7 million over the same period.
Nielsen calculates its traffic figures using a panel-based method called NetView, which the company describes as ‘around 45,000 UK internet users who have opted in to download a meter which records all their PC, online and application usage on a continual and ongoing basis.’
In contrast, websites register themselves with the ABCe, which then audits data on web traffic recorded by the sites.
Very different methods – very different results.
Interestingly Nielsen also provides data on the ‘engagement’ of UK unique users with a site, differentiating between ‘heavy’ (>15 minutes), ‘medium'(>5 – >=15 minutes) and ‘light'(<=5 minutes) users.
The results of this analysis suggest the most popular online newspapers – the Guardian and Telegraph – have the highest percentage of light visitors (with 83%and 81% respectively).
The results for engagement in full:
Sun: 14% heavy, 16% medium, 70% light
Times: 13% heavy, 17% medium, 70% light
Daily Mail: 12% heavy, 14% medium,75% light
Telegraph: 7% heavy, 12% medium, 81% light
Guardian: 6% heavy, 11% medium, 83% light
The figures suggest that the Times is the only title to have gained in ‘heavy’ users since January 2008, while the Telegraph has recorded the biggest increase in ‘light’ users over the same period.
As Stephen Brooks, UK managing director for Nielsen Online, pointed out in the release: “Analysing the Telegraph’s audience by heavy, medium and light visitors reveals their dramatic growth in popularity is concentrated around light users, which could be due to the site’s improved visibility in search results,”
“This encapsulates the ‘reach vs engagement’ conundrum that newspaper sites face – is the best path to financial success attracting the most visitors or having a smaller core of more engaged users?”