Tag Archives: the Telegraph

Telegraph merges picture desk and TV under new head

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Guy Ruddle has been appointed as the Telegraph‘s new head of visuals, according to a release from the publisher.

In his new role, Ruddle will oversee both the pictures department and Telegraph TV, which have recently been combined.

He will be responsible for all visual content across the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph and Telegraph.co.uk and will report to deputy editor Tony Gallagher.

Weekend editor of the Daily Telegraph, Jon Stock, is also set to take on some new digital responsibilities. Named as the new head of lifestyle, he will be tasked with developing digital content in the site’s lifestyle channel.

Redundancy round-up: 50 jobs to go at the Telegraph and 78 at Trinity Mirror

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A day that saw plenty of job cut announcements. Here’s the roundup for this evening and Journalism.co.uk will update tomorrow.

  • Trinity Mirror: 78 jobs to go as reported at Press Gazette and Hold the Front Page. Press Gazette reported that a restructure will see journalists divided into four centralised multimedia divisions:

“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.”

Breakingviews teams up with China’s Caijing

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Financial news website breakingviews.com has added another content partner in the guise of Chinese financial title, Caijing.

Caijing’s editors will select a daily column from the site’s output for re-publication from today, a press release from breakingviews.com said.

The site, which was founded in 1999, has already entered into syndication deals with the Telegraph, New York Times and Fortune.

What-gate? Can the media just make up their minds on what to call the Brand/Ross/Sachs fiasco?

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Little did the architects behind the office/hotel complex at the heart of the Nixon affair (doesn’t sound right does it?) know what an impact the building’s name would have on the British media.

It’s a legacy which has given British newspaper journalists an easy way to coin a name for the latest ‘scandal’ (scandal defined in its broadest sense: we have Flakegate, after all).

But when it comes to last week’s BBC outrage no-one seems to know which gate to stick with:

Media Guardian alone refers to Sachsgate, Granddaughtergate and Manuelgate.

We’ve seen Rossgate from the Telegraph, Brandgate from the Independent. For readers’ sake, since the coverage really doesn’t seem to be letting up, let’s have an agreed gate.

And some consistency please: should the named gate namesake be the perpetrators, or the victims of the ‘scandal’? That particular detail often bothers me: we’ve had Queengate, but also Cherie and Camillagate (Nipplegate of Justin Timberlake fame is a particular favourite).

Reuters and most of the papers/blogs are going with Manuelgate but my vote’s with ‘whatnewanglecanwepossiblytakenowgate’ (she says, fully aware of the irony as she pens her own tenuous angle for this blog post).

Mainly because Rossgate could lead to confusion for the poor pupils at this school in Hemel Hempstead.

Any gates on this particular story I’ve missed? For those that care and are thinking of writing their Masters thesis on the subject, there’s actually a Wikipedia page dedicated to ‘scandal-gates’ (which actually already lists Manuelgate, fyi).

Google phone madness – any journos out there got one yet?

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So it has arrived to the UK. The Google Phone, the T-Mobile G1.

Mixed reviews, as reported at the Telegraph. How does it compare to iPhone and will it beat it in sales?

For the journalists who reckon it’s worth it, it could prove very handy for blogging and filing away from the office. To be so darn well reliant on dodgy Wifi can be very frustrating at times. But any better than the iPhone?

Here’s a review from Times Online:’The T-Mobile G1 is great. The iPhone is better.’

Meanwhile, the tariffs for the new Blackberry Storm have been released.

Any journalists out there purchased one of these babies, and want to feedback?

NMK: ‘Prism of newspapers’ restricting online innovation, says Telegraph assistant editor

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Are there people in the media currently who can take the ‘radical action’ required to drive newspapers forward, Justin Williams, assistant editor of Telegraph Media Group, asked an industry gathering last night.

Speaking at New Media Knowledge’s (NMK) ‘What happens to newspapers?’ event, Williams said the Telegraph had ‘dropped the baton’ after it launched online and ‘seeded the ground for the Guardian very quickly’.

“We’ve been playing catch up for the last two or three years. What is required is radical action. I’m not certain at the moment we have the people in the industry who have the ideas to be radical enough. I think we’re constantly behind the curve with technological change and development,” he said.

“No matter how fantastic our newsroom looks and our web-first model is, we still look at things through the prism of newspapers.”

This ‘prism of newspapers’ is driving publishers to look at e-reading and e-paper technology, which is tied to the idea of print and, if the current fortunes of the print format are considered, ‘the world has moved so far beyond’, Williams said.

Yet changes may be driven by new recruits at the Telegraph, including ‘some pretty young people’, who ‘think utterly differently about what we [the Telegraph] publish and how we interact with it’.

New staff, he added, have been challenging the traditional idea of linear storytelling, suggesting a more ‘horizontal’ approach, for example starting with an interactive idea rather than a text article.

“They’re not necessarily coming from a news editor deciding what the agenda is and driving it down through the chain. It’s actually picking up on something that’s far more ethereal. It’s not user-generated content, it’s something far more nebular than that. It seems to feed an appetite,” explained Williams.

The title is keen to employ people who are ‘able to manipulate data in innovative ways’, he added. A specialist in data and mapping is currently being sought, though the paper has struggled to find the right candidate as yet, Williams said.

Makeover for the Telegraph business pages

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Today sees the launch of the all-new Telegraph.co.uk Finance – a merger of their business and personal finance sections into one channel.

The new format is the result of their new digital publishing and content management system, Escenic. A release from the Telegraph said that Escenic has allowed ‘easier navigation, improved accessibility and allows for contextually relevant data to be embedded in articles and throughout the channel.’

The new finance channel includes:

  • Edmund Conway’s ‘Economic Pulse’ blog
  • Two new platforms for funds and shares, where users can make their own portfolio

The channel is available on their mobile portal, out last month. The group has also developed a new widget for social bookmarking, a financial iPhone application, and a ‘Questor’ tool, which gives share and market tips.

Paul Farrow, digital personal finance editor, Telegraph.co.uk, said in the release: “Financial news has never mattered more. We wanted to strengthen our business coverage by looking at the reasons behind financial developments but also at how they directly affect the consumer.”

The changes are a continuation of their re-design process, started in July, which saw a new look for the news, sport and travel sections.

Grauniad.co.uk v Torygraph.co.uk: Round 374

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We’ve been following the various Telegraph/Guardian online interactions this week:

Yesterday, Roy Greenslade published an anonymous email from a Telegraph hack, who wrote that he/she was more than a little bit fed up.  The gist of the email was that all this multimedia-ised hub-it-up lark is to the detriment of a good, healthy working life and quality journalism.

Greenslade cautiously said he was printing the letter but that he didn’t necessarily agree with its sentiment.

Over at CounterValues, Telegraph assistant editor Justin Williams was quick to pooh pooh it. And now Greenslade has put up his response to the letter – a more negative stance this time: ‘the past is another country, think positive,’ he tells his ’emailing friend’.

Meanwhile, in another post, Williams took a swipe at the Guardian’s system of buying sponsored links and keywords. He reckons their buying is well in excess of the Telegraph’s and the Times’.

In the comments below the post, Charles Arthur, the Guardian’s technology editor, asks how many subsidised paper subscriptions the Telegraph has: ‘Is [buying sponsored links and keywords] a worse or better investment than subsidising paper subscriptions, do you think?’, he writes.

Charles Arthur is a keen Twitterer and I’ve just located Justin Williams on Twitter; all that Tweeting in agreement can be a bit boring: how about getting the discussion going in Twitterland? It’s a shame this didn’t get going earlier, with it being (unofficial?) ‘speak like a pirate day’ – that would make it fun. A good customer service team is essential for a growing business. The importance of satisfied customers is enormous. If you want to establish a serious brand, definitely don’t skimp on your customer service.

Can’t wait for next week’s ABCes…