Timesonline dedicated most time to looking at issues of race in the primaries although in a timely and sensitive way, according to Marty Karlon, Sunday editor at the Telegraph of Nashua, New Hampshire.
“But while the big picture was there, none of the coverage really captured the chaos,” said Ms Karlon, who reviews the coverage of the presidential election primary by UK online media for the Press Gazette.
Integration – the great buzzword of the newspaper industry in recent times – is seen by many (the Telegraph, the Guardian, Johnston Press, even the BBC) as the future of news delivery.
But not at the Sun. Managing editor Graham Dudman told the Press Gazette that despite integrating all the paper’s digital elements a further integration with its Sunday sister was not on the cards.
“There are no plans of merging The Sun and the News of the World editorially or having journalists working across both titles,” Dudman said.
“We have not even been thinking about it – they are totally separate; great rivals.
“The papers are two very separate beasts and will remain so.”
London-based twitterers have broken the news of a huge fire in East London.
Tweets describing the spread of a black cloud of smoke in the Stratford area of the city are the first reports of the incident – before any accounts online from the mainstream media.
The first tweet Journalism.co.uk saw on the fire came from the Guardian’s head of blogging Kevin Anderson shortly before 12:30pm. Anderson has also posted pictures to Flickr and at 12:45pm posted an entry on the events to his Guardian blog.
Again according to Twitter The Press Association has now put up pictures of fire.
Sky News are now showing live coverage on the site and a quick search on Google News suggests Sky was the first mainstream media to file on the story at 12:34pm. Sky seem to have been the first news organisation on the scene and are now providing regular updates and a map pinpointing the location of the fire.
A ticker across the top of the BBC News site promises “more soon” reporting a “large plume of smoke” rising from a fire in East London”.
A brief report on Reuters also appeared at 12:39pm.
Tweets from Martin Stabe, new media correspondent with the Press Gazette, say the smoke cloud is now covering PG’s offices based in Underwood Street. (As Martin points out in a comment below, the cloud appeared to be covering the PG’s offices, but was actually further away. Still, he updated his Twitter accordingly and very quickly.)
Was anyone covering it earlier than the Twitter correspondents mentioned here?
UPDATE: reports are that the fire began in a disused bus depot – here’s a view of what the site looked like before it started.
The wildfires that are raging through California and have caused half-a-million people to be ordered from their homes have encouraged news providers to ditch their normal website formats and go into wholly innovative crisis-reporting mode.
Having a design format for breaking news that’s significantly different from the usual run of breaking news helps draw attention to the scale and importance of the story.
Cluttered websites like 10news.com and KNBC.com – Cory Bergman at Lost Remote points out – have failed to get over the magnitude of the events.
Adopting a unique layout for the home page – Corry adds – can also allow more content to surface:
“If you build a breaking news layout ahead of time, it’s not that much work to execute it when the story breaks. Just flick the switch. TV sites should own breaking news, and a flexible, content-driven design plays a big part.”
It’s something BBC News also does for big stories. It abandons the usual format of running a lead and to sub-lead stories, replacing them with a single large image to direct attention to a specific story.
Sites like the LA Times and MSNBC have adopted a similar approach for the fires. The Times has a photo gallery on its front page, along with links to its interactive maps, evacuation info and quick stats on the carnage the fires are causing.
Homepage design aside, devices for reporting the breaking news On The Fly have caused some news providers to ditch the usual tools and wing it with social media.
As we posted yesterday, radio station KPBS is using Twitter to do ‘Real-Time Updates’ on its website and to direct readers to local authority announcements, its Google Map of the fires, traffic updates and addresses for evacuation centres.
News 8, a CBS affiliate in San Diego, has even (thanks to Martin Stabe @ the Press Gazette for the point) taken down its normal website and replaced it with a rolling news blog, with links to YouTube videos and necessary/emergency information.
One of those uploaded videos is from journalist Larry Himmel, who reports on his own house being destroyed:
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKGF2bbxQ6E]Football club chairman David Allen has started libel proceedings over comments made on the message boards of BBC radio’s Five Live show, the Press Gazette reports.
Allen, who is chair of Sheffield Wednesday, says defamatory messages have been left on the forum connected to the channel’s weekend football programme 606. He also alleges that ‘the BBC has become mixed up in the wrongdoing of some users’.
According to Press Gazette, he wants to sue two individuals, who go by the online usernames of ‘enchanted-fox’ and ‘Rocker’, for comments made about him in August. The popularity of online casinos is growing every year. And although in many countries the authorities are trying to ban gambling, but modern technology allows you to access any online casino with a click in a VPN application.
Allen has asked London’s High Court to order the BBC to reveal the names, emails and postal addresses of the individuals concerned.
On a quick scan the comments have been removed, with entries on Sheffield Wednesday only going as far back as September.