Tag Archives: the Telegraph

INM signs £40m print deal in Northern Ireland

Amid all the ominous news surrounding Independent News&Media a more positive story for the company has surfaced:

A £40m print deal will make Northern Ireland one of the biggest producers of daily newspapers in Europe, after INM signed contracts with the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mirror.

INM will now be printing all Mirror titles and the Telegraph titles, as well as the Sun, News of the World, the Daily Express and Sunday Express, the Daily Star and the London Independent.

The Belfast Telegraph reports:

“The first deal sees all sections of the Daily Telegraph printed in the company’s high-tech plant at Newry for the next 15 years. The second deal brings the Daily Mirror to the Belfast Telegraph print plant for a seven-year term.

“The deals represent two of the longest print agreements signed in the region and have been made possible by an IN&M investment strategy which has seen more than £50m spent on new presses in both centres.”

Journalism Daily: AutoTrader tips, Technorati’s ‘original content’ and the online anonymity debate

A daily round-up of all the content published on the Journalism.co.uk site. You can also sign up to our e-newsletter and subscribe to the feed for the Journalism Daily here.

News and features:

Ed’s picks:

Tip of the day:

#FollowJourn:

On the Editor’s Blog:

You must not embed the Telegraph’s embeddable video

It might look like you can embed this Telegraph video on your blog:

telegraphembed

But no: please take note of the last part.

As both Journalism.co.uk and Fred Hatman, a journalist in South Africa found out, embed codes are only for ‘personal use’. That didn’t include Hatman (@fredhatman) even though he is a lone blogger.

Instead, we had to feature the story of the Telegraph journalist who was attacked by a lion after willingly entering its enclosure (mauling received surprisingly cheerfully) without the accompanying video. We got permission to link though!

Syndication@telegraph.co.uk informs us:

“I’m afraid at this time we can’t grant permission for you to host the video, but you are welcome to link to it.”

So we asked them why they supplied the code? And how could we fulfil the requirements for a licence? They replied:

“My understanding is that this function is for personal use only, not for commercial use, as per our terms and conditions.  Often we are able to issue a licence for the content, but on this occasion Telegraph.co.uk are not offering this video for web syndication.”

Journalism.co.uk wonders how Telegraph.co.uk will monitor and police misuse of the videos – if abuse was extensive. Or how they decide who is commercial and who is not? If, as the Syndication people tell us, ‘on this occasion Telegraph.co.uk are not offering this video for web syndication’ why bother supplying it at all? Isn’t that just asking for trouble?

Stephen Farrell’s kidnap raises the ‘media blackout’ question: it’s time for a debate in the UK

This week’s operation in Afghanistan to rescue New York Times journalist Stephen Farrell, during which a British soldier, Farrell’s Afghan translator (Sultan Munadi) and two civilians were killed, has provoked national debate in the UK:

“One senior Army source told the Daily Telegraph “When you look at the number of warnings this person had it makes you really wonder whether he was worth rescuing, whether it was worth the cost of a soldier’s life.” (Telegraph.co.uk)

Many of the commenters on news stories feel very strongly that it was wrong for a journalist’s actions to lead to such tragic consequences, as Jon Slattery noted on his blog yesterday. Further still: “Members of the Armed Forces have expressed anger that he [Farrell] ignored warnings not to visit the site of an air strike on two hijacked fuel tankers that killed scores of Taliban and innocent villagers,” the Telegraph reported. Others defend the role of journalists in Afghanistan: for example, the Committee to Protect Journalists and the International Federation of Journalists.

This tragic incident also raised another issue, that of media silence. Today a special report by Joe Strupp on Editor&Publisher questions whether media blackouts are appropriate when reporters are kidnapped in war zones. It’s an excellent overview of recent events, that looks back at the case of another New York Times journalist, David Rohde – the paper managed to keep news of his kidnap off Wikipedia until his escape seven months later.

The question of media blackout is one Journalism.co.uk has raised in the past. In January, we reported on the silence surrounding the kidnap of the Telegraph’s Colin Freeman and José Cendon in Somalia. We had been asked not to report on the case by the Telegraph and the UK Foreign Office when the pair went missing at the end of 2008. The ban was lifted when they were released.

However, as we reported, some information was published before the blackout request was made clear: the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) released information relating to the journalists’ kidnap on November 26 2008 and Roy Greenslade subsequently blogged about it at Guardian.co.uk – the post was removed but it was still captured in the RSS feed.

It’s a complex issue that Strupp raises in his E&P article:

“With Rohde’s escape, a major debate ignited in and out of the journalism community about how responsible the coordinated secret had been. Was this a breach of journalistic ethics, sitting on a story for so long mainly because a colleague was involved?”

Strupp quotes Edward Wasserman, a journalism professor at Washington & Lee University in Virginia, who echoed claims of other critics, that the Times and similar news outlets would not do the same for a non-journalist: “Some people are in a position to implore the press for restraint better than others”.

It is a debate we need to have in the UK too: the London-based Frontline Club would be an ideal venue in which to hold a discussion with representatives from the UK foreign office, press freedom and safety organisations and news organisations raising the reasons for and against media blackouts. The practicalities of enforcement also need to be discussed. We understand that such an idea is in the pipeline, so we’ll keep you posted.

Please do share links to existing debate online.

In the meantime, here is a link to an item on this morning’s BBC Radio 4 Today programme, featuring Frontline Club founder and cameraman (and former soldier) Vaughan Smith and the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen discussing the Stephen Farrell case.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8247000/8247681.stm

British journalist rescued from Taliban but interpreter died; reports suggest British soldier also killed

Stephen Farrell, a British-Irish journalist working for the New York Times, was rescued from Taliban captivity on Wednesday morning, according to global news reports.

His Afghan interpreter, Sultan Munadi, was killed during the operation, the Telegraph reports.

According to as yet unconfirmed reports by the Associated Press, a British commando was also killed during the raid.

The Guardian reports:

“Military officials in Kabul told the Associated Press a British soldier was killed in the raid. The Ministry of Defence was unable to confirm the reports this morning.”


Photography Is Not-A-Crime.com: images from the fourth plinth

At the beginning of August the photographer Spike Brown mounted the Trafalgar Square fourth plinth, with a simple message: photographers, both professional and amateur, have the right to take photos in public. He supported two campaigns:

The British Journal of Photography aims to raise international awareness about the threat of attack, arrest or harassment to photographers in the UK. A Flickr group pool of self-portraits can be found here.

  • ‘AP Rights Watch’

Updates on The Amateur Photographer’s ‘AP Rights Watch’ campaign to protect photographers’ rights can be found at www.amateurphotographer.co.uk.

Brown’s ascent was reported at the time by the Telegraph’s Kate Day here, by the British Journal of Photography here, and by Amateur Photographer here [August 3].

You can see the video of Brown on the plinth here at OneandOther.co.uk.

He has kindly shared his own view from the plinth with us.

This self-portrait:

spikebrown1

and another view:

spikebrown2

Spike Brown, Blue Feather Photography, www.bluefeather.co.uk

Pagemasters editorial outsourcing spreads to the US and Canada

Editorial outsourcing firm Pagemasters has announced a partnership with the Canadian Press to provide a range of production services, including design, sub-editing and headline writing, to titles in the US and Canada.

The new division, Pagemasters North America, will be a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Canadian Press, which already provides pagination services to Canadian daily newspapers including The Globe and Mail and Toronto Star.

The move by Australian Associated Press (AAP), the national news agency of Australia, which owns the editing company, follows a contract with Telegraph Media Group announced in January to provide sub-editing services for the Daily and Sunday Telegraph’s weekend supplements.

In a previous article in The Sunday Morning Herald, Pagemasters managing director Bruce Davidson commented on how useful a time zone difference is for the editing process: “The Telegraph can deliver pages at the end of their day, and when they come in the next morning we have completed the work.”

In today’s release, Davidson said: “The launch of Pagemasters North America is a major development and I believe one which has the potential to lead to significant changes in the editorial production model for US and Canadian newspapers.

“We will be heavily involved with The Canadian Press in setting up editorial production centres in North America, working closely with newspaper publishers as they grapple with the radical changes sweeping the industry.”

How sticky are UK newspaper sites? 62.8 per cent of users look at just one page, says Alexa

This is a cross-post from Malcolm Coles’ personal website, and first appeared here. You can read other posts by Coles on the Journalism.co.uk Editors’ Blog at this link.

Visitors to UK newspaper sites look at an average of 2.5 pages a day, according to data from Alexa [click through from chart below]. But 62.8 per cent of users look at just one page.

In terms of daily page views per user, the Sun (4 pages), Guardian (3.1) and Telegraph (2.9) are above average. Visitors to the Mail site look at just 2.4 pages a day – so while the Mail may have come top in the July ABCe figures, maybe its large number of overseas visitors aren’t staying to look round the site.

Newspaper Daily page views
per user
Bounce
rate (%)
The Sun 4 48.5
Guardian 3.1 59.2
Telegraph 2.9 65.2
Daily Mail 2.4 60.7
Times Online 2.4 59.7
Independent 2.2 70.4
FT.com 1.9 66.8
Mirror 1.7 67.5
Express 1.7 66.7
Average 2.5 62.8
  • Better than average figures are in bold.
  • The bounce rate is the percentage of visits that consisted of just one page (so a low number is good).
  • These figures are 3-month averages. These change on a daily basis at Alexa – so they may have altered slightly by the time you check. Click the papers’ names to see the current data.
  • The overall average at the bottom is a simple average – it has not been weighted by traffic.

Page views vs bounce rate
The table is ranked by daily page views per user. The bounce rate is another measure of stickiness. It doesn’t exactly correlate with page views, as papers may have differing proportions of loyal, engaged users who visit lots of pages. The more pages that these users visit, the better the page view figure – but they won’t affect the bounce rate.

The Telegraph has a worse bounce rate than the sites near it in the table, perhaps because the great success with its Digg tool doesn’t always lead to multi-page visits?

Using Alexa data
There are issues with using Alexa data like this as it underrepresents UK users, who may have differing usage patterns to other visitors. However, as it seems to underrepresent them more or less equally, the rankings should be ok, even if the absolute figures are all out by the same margin.

Oh, and all the papers are doing better than me! Visitors to my own blog look at 1.5 pages a day and I have a 76 per cent bounce rate (which gets a bit worse when I publish things like Tweets people pray their bosses doesn’t see).

Malcolm Coles: How US traffic is vital for UK newspaper sites

This is a cross-post from Malcolm Coles’ personal website. You can read other posts by Coles on the Journalism.co.uk Editors’ Blog at this link.

The latest figures for UK users from the audited ABCes together with Compete‘s figures for American site usage show how USA traffic is vital for UK newspaper sites.

On average, US traffic is 36.8 per cent of the UK traffic (i.e. there is just over one US visitor for every 3 UK visitors). The figure for the Telegraph is slightly higher (44.5 per cent) and for the Mail it’s a massive 62.5 per cent.

Newspaper
site
USA
visitors
(Compete)
UK
visitors
(ABCe)
US users
as % of UK
Daily Mail 5,199,078 8,316,083 62.5
Telegraph 4,087,769 9,184,082 44.5
Times Online 2,805,815 7,668,637 36.6
Guardian 3,676,498 10,211,385 36.0
Independent 1,317,298 3,781,320 34.8
The Sun 2,419,319 8,704,036 27.8
Mirror 748,098 4,907,540 15.2
FT.com 5,960,589 n/a n/a
Express 63,216 n/a n/a
Average 2,919,742 7,539,012 36.8

These figures are all for June 2009. The FT wasn’t audited in June’s ABCes. The Express isn’t in the ABCes.

They are further proof that the Mail’s success in the June ABCes was driven by American searches for Michael Jackson’s kids.