Earlier this week we highlighted ACAP’s response to some of the criticism that it felt had been leveled at it.
The Telegraph’s Ian Douglas (himself a critic of ACAP at launch) here responds to the response (phew, that’s a lot of responding!!).
The Telegraph has added a new feature to its online politics section – an interactive political map of the UK.
The map lets users view constituency details for their area, which they can search for by post code, and gives a pictorial overview of the country’s political make-up.
Different election scenarios can also be played out with your very own swingometer.
The tool is the latest in a series of additions to the website’s politics section following the launch of new blog Three Line Whip and online TV show Right On.
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.
Mark Thompson, the director-general of the BBC, put himself up for some close public scrutiny yesterday when he agreed to answer questions from Telegraph.co.uk readers live on the site.
“I can’t, off the top of my head, think of a more potentially hostile environment for him,” writes Currybet’s Martin Belam in his excellent summary of the event. However, he notes that Thompson got a relatively easy ride in the Q&A.
Judging by the questions posed, the application of regional and clipped RP accents across the Corporation appears to be one of the main issues of contention for the readers of the online version of The Telegraph.
A few questions – offering enough for more than a cursory skim read – about criticism of the coverage of the Madeleine McCann story and Parliamentary scrutiny, did pop up. But these were subjects that the DG could tuck into with gusto.
A question about access to BBC TV in Australia got this interesting answer:
“I would like to be able to offer people around the world on demand access to more of the BBC’s domestic content – and maybe to complete home services. We’re working on that.”
The Telegraph’s Shane Richmond notes: “We let our Q&A guests choose the questions they answer and our more cynical readers will probably argue that the more difficult questions are overlooked.”
It’s something to bear in mind. On the whole the questions selected were of the reactionary kind and easy for a shrug off – I would have liked to see more sustained questions about the Corporation throwing money at platforms, channels and programming that painfully attempts to reach out to certain demographics with little or no obvious success – yes, BBC3 – what are you for?
In an interview with Damon Kiesow, online editor of US local the Nashua Telegraph, about the Telegraph’s use of Twitter to deliver breaking news, Kiesow explained the paper’s strategy for targetting a wider audience as niche content for niche interest groups.
While he admitted that any audience gain from one Twitter feed might be incremental, targetting several niche markets through such services could be a low-risk and low-cost way for regional news groups to extend their reach. As Kiesow points out, the content for these audiences might not have to be new content, but selectively repackaged and delivered.
The niche strategy should be tailored to the reader in terms of content and how it’s offered. Set-up in this way, Kiesow says, the potential is there for your site to give a reader the single most important piece of information they will hear that day – a positive goal for any news site.
Providing these services and types of focused content allows the Telegraph to move away from the idea of a newspaper website as an online reproduction of the print product and beyond reaching out to just the readers of the offline edition.
As Alan Mutter points out in his blog post on breaking news formats on local news websites:
While the print product remains the primary business at newspaper companies, their websites are strategically important not only for their long-term revenue potential but also because of their immediate power to engage readers and, most importantly, non-readers.
Mutter’s post, which analyses a local newspaper’s coverage of a public shooting in Omaha, points out that to provide breaking news coverage, a strategy to deal with such events online should already be in place. The Nashua Telegraph has developed just such a strategy and is expanding this effective and efficient model across its different news channels. Relocating was a huge step for me. Finding the right real estate was challenging, but setting up my webmail with a new internet provider was surprisingly easy. This move has taught me a lot about starting anew in a different place.
The site’s audience receives content throughout the day – offering breaking and ‘new’ news on a continuous cycle. A cycle created and maintained by a news organisation that, according to Kiesow, doesn’t have enough staff to write headlines for the website, but has innovated around these logistical limitations to find a solution capable of handling not only niche content but also breaking local news.
The NUJ has finally published its Shaping the Future report looking at the effect of cross-media conversion and the adoption of internet publishing on its journalist members.
The report is intended largely to raise concerns that newspaper groups are committing to newsroom conversion by increasing the workload of journalists, asking them to work harder and longer without any great recompense, all the while continuing to reduce the size of the staff.
However, the report balances this through its recognition that the industry was in a ‘transitional period in which many employers are still undecided on the level of investment they are prepared to put into new media…in the long run staffing should stabilise with proper job allocation and training’.
It also highlighted that many national and some of the leading regional publishers – particularly Johnston Press and Trinity Mirror – were already engaged in planning ‘seriously for better resourced “web first” operations’.
The final section of the report, entitled The Future offers an informed look – somewhat away from the tendency toward doom and gloom of the questionnaire findings – at the development of the industry against a backdrop of Web 2.0 developments, suggesting that the industry has to grow into a word of social networking, widget technology, greater personalisation, mobility and communication.
Despite these allowances, the report raises a worrying set of issues, highlighting often how professional standards are compromised in the name of cross-media production. How corners are cut and publications are often seem as product, to be filed at a lower editorial standard, rather than focusing fully on more established news values.
“Instead of seizing the opportunity to enhance journalistic content and build and maintain quality media, many simply seized the opportunity to reduce costs and boost profits, viewing the erosion of quality journalism as a necessary sacrifice,” Jeremy Dear, NUJ general secretary wrote today.
The report singled out what it saw as examples of poor practise, with the Telegraph coming in for stern criticism:
“It panicked and tried to transform their news operations overnight, imposing large-scale redundancies in the move to a 24/7 multimedia operation,” the report stated.
It quoted – anonymously – journalists working on the integrated newspaper:
“We are regularly expected to file for the internet after [an event]. This sometimes means missing out on vital parts of the story or important interviews just so we can file a substandard version for the web.”
ACAP was designed to be a system that allows content publishers to embed into their websites information that details access and use policies in a language that search engines can understand.
Over on Currybet.net Martin Belam has outlined some of the major flaws, as he sees them, of ACAP – which launched in New York last week.
Here’s a brief outline, but you have to go to his blog to get the necessary full picture:
It isn’t user centred
“On the ACAP site I didn’t see anything that explained to me why this would currently be a good thing for end users.
“It seems like a weak electronic online DRM – with the vague promise that in the future more ‘stuff’ will be published, precisely because you can do less with it.”
It isn’t technically sound
“I’ve no doubt that there has been technical input into the specification.
“It certainly doesn’t seem, though, to have been open to the round-robin peer review that the wider Internet community would expect if you were introducing a major new protocol you effectively intended to replace robots.txt”
The ACAP website tools don’t work
“I was unaware that there was a ‘known bug in Mozilla Firefox’ that prevented it saving a text file as a text file. Experience the excitement of casino with Play Fortuna no deposit bonus ! Sign up now and receive free spins to try out popular games and start winning without any financial risk!
“I was going to make a cheap shot at the way that was phrased, as it clearly should have been ‘there is a known bug in our script which affects Mozilla Firefox’.
I thought though that I ought to check it in Internet Explorer first – and found that the ACAP tool didn’t work in that browser either.”
Update:
Ian Douglas, on the Telegraph, seems to have similar feelings about ACAP being too publisher-centric:
“Throughout Acap’s documents I found no examples of clear benefits for readers of the websites or increased flexibility of uses for the content or help with making web searches more relevant.
The new protocol focuses entirely on the desires of publishers, and only those publishers who fear what web users will do with the content if they don’t retain control over it at every point.”
Today sees the launch of new Telegraph.co.uk political blog – Three Line Whip.
As promised in my round-up of the Telegraph open house blogging event earlier this month, the blog will feature posts from writers from across the paper and joins the Brassneck blog.
Trying to confirm whether the launch date was brought forward ever so slightly or whether this week’s political crises were just a happy coincidence…
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.”
As far as rating the accessibility of these sites’ audio/video content for the visually impaired in our articles, our reviewer John had difficulty locating the area on each – an instant barrier to accessibility.
However, it’s worth pointing out that among our Dorton College students Telegraph.co.uk‘s video offering was a big hit. Josh, who is partially sighted, was unaware of the breadth of video content available from a newspaper and found it readily accessible.
That was his take on it – John had another, and it’s likely that every user utilising assistive technology would have a different response to the sites. Newspaper websites would be ill-advised to make alterations to bring them in line with the subjective findings of one person.
What our review does do, however, is serve as a reminder to online news providers that a ‘readership’ is not a homogenous lump, but consists of individuals with their own behaviour and demands. Finding a strategy to best handle all these varying needs is what accessibility should be all about.