Tag Archives: The Sun

Local newspapers must ‘own’ local news, says Curley

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In a recent blog post, the Washington Post’s Rob Curley applauds the Las Vegas Sun newspaper for its coverage of a fire at the Monte Carlo hotel, Las Vegas. Curley heaps praise on the layered and multimedia approach the paper took in its reporting, as well as the speed with which it was produced.

This is his breakdown of how the news was reported by the Sun:

1. Began with a live blog, regularly updated by the newsroom staff.

2. Addition of photos – the newspaper also set up a way for users to submit their own images through Flickr.

3. Overview of the situation and context e.g. history of the Monte Carlo hotel.

4. Addition of videos – all put up, as Curley points out, while the building was still burning.

“To me, this was a nearly textbook example of how a local newspaper should cover a big breaking news story in its community in the iPhone era,” Curley writes.

His advice to other newspaper newsrooms: be prepared for breaking news.

  • Ask what the contingency plan is for a sudden surge in traffic coming to your site – can it cope?
  • Have breaking news page templates to hand – something that Curley used in his time with the Naples Daily News and the Lawrence Journal-World.
  • Offer real time coverage to beat rival media.
  • Don’t just treat the story in print – this will be after the event has happened and too late.

Why bother? Because, says Curley, local news organisations should use their proximity to events to beat off the competition and serve their audience best.

A comment on this article from Saturday’s print edition of the newspaper, which was used to complement the web coverage, neatly sums up Curley’s argument: “I couldn’t have got that from CNN or any other news station. I was hooked from the start.”

J.co.uk: Murdoch dismayed by the amount of celebrity coverage in The Sun, claims its editor

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We’ve run this news story on the main site:

http://www.journalism.co.uk/2/articles/530935.php

We’ve also run a further, related piece:

Internet ‘significant in 14 or 15 years time’ until then the paper makes the money, claims Sun editor 

Food for thought on feeds (but only a third fed)

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Yesterday was a day of thirds for me. Two thirds good, one third not so good. In the first two thirds, I attended a roundtable discussion on RSS hosted by MediaFed, a provider of RSS feed tools and services.

It would have been topped off with an excellent three-course meal had I not had to leave for another meeting after the starter (so only one third of a lunch for me, and those that know me well will appreciate how I grieved for the loss of that sticky ginger pudding).

Ahem, but I digress. The purpose of the first discussion was to get some representatives from the UK publishing industry around a table to discuss their current implementation of RSS feeds and how they expect the platform to develop in the future. Before I summarise the points of the discussion, I think it would be useful to summarise what I think are the key RSS requirements from both readers and publishers.
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No integration for the Sun and the News Of The World

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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.”

Accessibility 2.0: The Sun and The Times

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When reviewing Times Online and theSun.co.uk for our series on accessibility, we only really skimmed the surface of both sites’ blogging areas.

This was largely because issues of accessibility prevented our user from locating the blogs section on each website. Asking them for their thoughts once I, as a sighted user, had helped locate them would have been misleading.

The lack of a dedicated ‘blogs’ link or section heading on each site’s homepage illustrates the papers’ differing approach to blogging – Sun blogs come under the personalised My Sun area; whereas Times’ blogs are listed in the comment section.

While this means that any user purposefully looking for this section might struggle to find it without prior knowledge, this is an issue of content rather than accessibility. Each newspaper has chosen not to feature a blogs section on its homepage, because this is may not be the content it wants to flag up first.

This is a subjective choice by the publisher, which may not meet the subjective needs of all the audience. So does making a news website accessible mean making a compromise to try and please most of the people, most of the time?