#FollowJourn: Alison Gow
Who? Executive digital editor
What? Part of newsroom overseeing all things digital at the Liverpool Daily Post and Liverpool Echo
Where? @alisongow
Contact? alison.gow [at] liverpool.com
Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips every day, we’re recommending journalists to follow online too. They might be from any sector of the industry: please send suggestions (you can nominate yourself) to judith or laura at journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.
#FollowJourn: Kevin Matthews
Who? Head of web and data at the Liverpool Daily Post.
What? Journalist: Head of data and web development, Trinity Mirror Merseyside: Liverpool Echo, Liverpool Daily Post and Merseyside Weeklies.
Where? @kmatt
Contact? kevin.matthews@liverpool.com
Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips every day, we’re recommending journalists to follow online too. They might be from any sector of the industry: please send suggestions (you can nominate yourself) to judith or laura at journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.
#FollowJourn: David Higgerson
Who? Head of multimedia for Trinity Mirror; executive editor Birmingham Post and Mail.
What? Oversees multimedia developments for Trinity Mirror’s regional titles.
Where? @davidhiggerson or on the Liverpool Daily Post’s politics blog.
Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips every day, we’re recommending journalists to follow online too. They might be from any sector of the industry: please send suggestions (you can nominate yourself) to judith or laura at journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.
It was an ‘oversight’ that Madeleine McCann related keywords were included in the metadata for every main local news story on the Liverpool Daily Post site, a Trinity Mirror spokeperson said, after Journalism.co.uk informed the company that the terms were present in the ‘hidden text’ of a series of unrelated news items.
The automatic inclusion of the keywords “madeleine mccann, madeleine mcgann, kate mcgann, kate mccann” in the HTML for Liverpool news stories has now ceased.
Journalism.co.uk learned in May that specific keywords, including those above, were used in the metadata for the ‘Liverpool News Headlines’ section on the Liverpool Daily Post site, regardless of the story’s relevance. This continued for at least one month before it was drawn to the Post’s attention on Monday (June 29).
Use of unrelated ‘hidden’ metadata is commonly known as ‘keyword stuffing’, a practice which Google firmly discourages. Using popular keywords can help improve a site’s SEO performance. [Update: Google and most other search engines are no longer believed (Wikipedia link here) to recognise these tags: see Lammo.net post at this link.]
Google search results for “Madeleine McCann + Liverpool” shows that the Post and its sister site, the Liverpool Echo, have top rankings for related Madeleine McCann stories. [Update: but lower rankings when a simple Madeleine McCann search is performed. It’s unlikely the addition of the keywords aided the LDP’s Google ranking. Google says: “While accurate meta descriptions can improve clickthrough, they won’t impact your ranking within search results.”]
A Trinity Mirror spokesman said: “The metadata was inserted some time ago when the Madeleine McCann story was at its height and was the most-searched item on our web sites. It was inserted to make it easier for our users to access a huge story of national and local interest. The fact that it wasn’t removed is an oversight, which has now been put right.”
The evidence (before Liverpool Daily Post corrected the error this week):
A story about Len Williams, a well-known waterfront manager who recently died.
The section of the site which used these keywords for all stories:
“‘Keyword stuffing’ refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google’s search results. Filling pages with keywords results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site’s ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.
“To fix this problem, review your site for misused keywords. Typically, these will be lists or paragraphs of keywords, often randomly repeated. Check carefully, because keywords can often be in the form of hidden text, or they can be hidden in title tags or alt attributes.
“Once you’ve made your changes and are confident that your site no longer violates our guidelines, submit your site for reconsideration.”
A definition by Nathan Campbell on SEO.com:
“Some unethical SEOs choose to employ renegade tactics such as keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is overloading the content or meta tags of the web page with every possible keyword or phrase that relates to the site in many different forms.”
Today’s story from the Liverpool Daily Post on council staff taking sick leave was the result of a Freedom of Information request made through democracy website www.whatdotheyknow.com.
And how do we know?
Because the source and links to the information released through the FOI request are included at the bottom of the article. A nice touch.
(Thanks to Andy Dickinson for telling us about this)
A day that saw plenty of job cut announcements. Here’s the roundup for this evening and Journalism.co.uk will update tomorrow.
“The publisher has today entered into a consultation period with staff and said it envisaged 59 editorial jobs would be cut. It said it was committed to voluntary redundancies where possible.
“The bulk of the job losses will come in Liverpool, where the 175-strong editorial team will be cut to 132 and the Liverpool Daily Post will scrap its Saturday edition.”
“It is understood the cuts represent a 13-14 per cent saving to the editorial budget and will be brought into effect by Christmas at the latest,” reports MediaGuardian.
The Liverpool regional papers, the Liverpool Daily Post and Echo, continue their comprehensive coverage of the Rhys Jones murder trial using Cover It Live technology, which allows the reporter to feed back detailed information about what is happening in the courtroom.
The liveblog of the Rhys Jones trial is currently on standby, but should be going again at 14.30 today. The Rhys Jones coverage can also be viewed together on one page.
For ease of reading back through, it would be good to have the live court coverage more clearly marked with dates and days of trial in the left hand margin next to the times.
On October 9 the Liverpool Daily Post’s editor, Mark Thomas, asked for feedback, but it seems none has been offered.
It’s an impressive feat, which has been going since October 9, and brings up questions of modern day court reporting: it will be interesting to see if it enters the public panel discussion at this week’s POLIS debate at LSE. They’re debating ‘Respect for Contempt: Keeping Speech Free and Trials Fair’.
With a panel that includes Maxine Mawhinney from BBC News 24 as chair, and contributions from Joshua Rozenburg (Legal Affairs Editor, Daily Telegraph), Jonathan Kotler (US Attorney and USC Annenburg School of Journalism), Mark Haslam (partner, BCL Burton Copeland, and Nick Davies (Guardian, author of Flat Earth News), it should make for an interesting set of much-needed discussions.
Nice use of timeline builder Dipity by the Evening Leader: the paper has plotted videos and text reports of UFO sitings in the area onto a timeline, turned it into a widget and embedded it on its website.
What’s extra nice is that the Dipity widget lets readers look at the info as a timeline, map, flipbook or list. Using the third-party service helps the newspaper get extra mileage out of what are no doubt already popular online stories.
The feature has also been made ‘public’ through dipity’s site to help drive traffic back to the Evening Leader.
The tool has previously been used by the Manchester Evening News for its coverage of a proposed congestion charge for the city; and the Liverpool Daily Post to create a 24-hour snapshot of Liverpool as this year’s European Capital of Culture.
Trinity Mirror regional titles, Newcastle’s Journal, the Birmingham Post and the Liverpool Post have joined forces to report on the economic situation on this live blog, happening right now, as we type this post.
It’s charting the falling FTSE share index and the Liverpool Daily Post reporter Alison Gow twittered this morning that it is the brainchild of Birmingham Post editor Marc Reeves and the head of regional multimedia David Higgerson.
Its purpose: “to provide live information on breaking news surrounding the banking crisis, as well as informed opinion from our team of experts across the country,” the administrator wrote at 12.19.
The poll shows that 63 per cent of voters think that yes, the government should offer 100 per cent protection on all savings.
At 14.23 Sion Barry of Media Wales writes that the length of of the recession ‘really is the golden question. Some sectors of the economy have been in recession from a while… just ask a housebuilder.’
The papers are using Coveritlive.com to create the blog.
The Manchester Evening News has used free online tool Dipity to create an interactive timeline of the paper’s coverage of a proposed congestion charge for Greater Manchester.
The timeline features text and images from key dates in the ongoing story, dating back to January 10 2005.
The information can also be displayed and browsed by text-only, images-only or on a map.
The Liverpool Daily Post recently used the same online tool to create an interactive timeline for its diary of a day in Liverpool.