Nearly half of employers received more than 50 applications for every graduate job, and the fiercest competition was in banking or financial services, investment banking, retail, engineering and the industrial sector.
The number of jobs cut was far worse than anticipated by recruiters, who had predicted just a 5.4 per cent drop in a February survey by the AGR.
More employers than ever are insisting on online-only applications this year (81 per cent) and the competition seems to have brought out the best in many graduates – 40 per cent of employers reported an improvement in the quality of applications.
According to the AGR, graduate recruitment in the media industry was not covered by the survey, because it is too small.
Last year Trinity Mirror, once one of biggest recruiters of trainee journalists, imposed a recruitment freeze and suspended its training scheme for its national Mirror Group titles.
Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips every day, we’re recommending journalists to follow online too. They might be from any sector of the industry: please send suggestions (you can nominate yourself) to judith or laura at journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.
He applauds the agency for a ‘bold and imaginative’ move, which, he says, warrants public funding.
“Essentially, it will relieve newspaper editors of their current headaches in trying (and failing) to cover the whole local agenda. The nuts and bolts will be available to them. Instead, their reporters can get on with digging and delving,” he writes.
Interesting comments left on the post too, including one from Blackadder, who claims to be a former PA employee:
“To turn the PA into a fully-fledged public service will involve a root and branch upheaval of the current company, and that will never happen if profit is the watchword. They should not be given a penny of public money.”
It was an ‘oversight’ that Madeleine McCann related keywords were included in the metadata for every main local news story on the Liverpool Daily Post site, a Trinity Mirror spokeperson said, after Journalism.co.uk informed the company that the terms were present in the ‘hidden text’ of a series of unrelated news items.
The automatic inclusion of the keywords “madeleine mccann, madeleine mcgann, kate mcgann, kate mccann” in the HTML for Liverpool news stories has now ceased.
Journalism.co.uk learned in May that specific keywords, including those above, were used in the metadata for the ‘Liverpool News Headlines’ section on the Liverpool Daily Post site, regardless of the story’s relevance. This continued for at least one month before it was drawn to the Post’s attention on Monday (June 29).
Use of unrelated ‘hidden’ metadata is commonly known as ‘keyword stuffing’, a practice which Google firmly discourages. Using popular keywords can help improve a site’s SEO performance. [Update: Google and most other search engines are no longer believed (Wikipedia link here) to recognise these tags: see Lammo.net post at this link.]
Google search results for “Madeleine McCann + Liverpool” shows that the Post and its sister site, the Liverpool Echo, have top rankings for related Madeleine McCann stories. [Update: but lower rankings when a simple Madeleine McCann search is performed. It’s unlikely the addition of the keywords aided the LDP’s Google ranking. Google says: “While accurate meta descriptions can improve clickthrough, they won’t impact your ranking within search results.”]
A Trinity Mirror spokesman said: “The metadata was inserted some time ago when the Madeleine McCann story was at its height and was the most-searched item on our web sites. It was inserted to make it easier for our users to access a huge story of national and local interest. The fact that it wasn’t removed is an oversight, which has now been put right.”
The evidence (before Liverpool Daily Post corrected the error this week):
A story about Len Williams, a well-known waterfront manager who recently died.
“‘Keyword stuffing’ refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google’s search results. Filling pages with keywords results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site’s ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.
“To fix this problem, review your site for misused keywords. Typically, these will be lists or paragraphs of keywords, often randomly repeated. Check carefully, because keywords can often be in the form of hidden text, or they can be hidden in title tags or alt attributes.
“Once you’ve made your changes and are confident that your site no longer violates our guidelines, submit your site for reconsideration.”
“Some unethical SEOs choose to employ renegade tactics such as keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is overloading the content or meta tags of the web page with every possible keyword or phrase that relates to the site in many different forms.”
National Union of Journalists (NUJ) has learned of plans to reduce frequency of the Birmingham Post and potentially cut eight weekly titles from the region.
While all members of the panel agreed that this was the worst crisis faced by local media in the industry’s history, Fry said the decline in advertising revenues for his group was more cyclical than structural.
“That implies that there will be a bounce in advertising when that changes. From here onwards we’re likely to bottom out. When the economy recovers we’ll see a recovery in advertising,” he said.
Guardian Media Group chief executive Carolyn McCall was quick to temper Fry’s optimism:
“I don’t believe the prospects for recovery, particularly in classified advertising are particularly strong. I don’t expect to see a great deal of those three big markets – I don’t think bounce is the right word – I think it will come back slowly, it will come back in a different form or shape,” she said.
“The structural change is too profound and the economic recession has just hammered it. Deregulation is one step towards helping. It’s not a panacea. It raises all sorts of important issues about jobs.
“One thing we’re going to have to face about this industry is that it’s going to be a smaller industry with less people in it. Consolidation will help because then the clustering of assets in the right place, will makes more sense, you’ll get more scale.”
All three panellists (Fry, McCall and Trinity Mirror’s Sly Bailey) taking part in the evidence session (which had earlier taken comments from Claire Enders and DC Thomson’s Christopher Thomson) supported consolidation and the relaxation of newspaper merger rules to help local newspapers.
Yet it was McCall again with the most sensible comments – a range of issues and possible solutions need to be considered: discussions about aggregators; consolidation; support for web development; the use of part-paid, part-free access; state-funding; and the problem of council newspapers.
The industry needs to move away from the display advertising model to – not just one business model – but lots of business models, she added.
Breaking news procedures and the idea of the ‘exclusive’ have shifted (are arguably in flux) as journalism has moved online.
Blogging about the Mail’s scoop, Joanna Geary asks whether the title made the right decision not to post the letter in full until 12:30pm, having broken the story on the site earlier.
Did this allow the rest of the ‘pack’ to steal in on the Mail’s ‘exclusive’?
Mail editor Steve Dyson helpfully explains the editorial decisions behind breaking the story in this way:
“My thoughts at 7am conference when I realised the strength of what we had was to refuse any access to the letter for as long as possible. Tease it online and boost sales (…) The unexpected boost was Setanta, PA, Five Live, Sky Sports and TalkSport all calling us to beg for the letter and, upon understanding why we were saying ‘no’ for print sales, offering interviews with the editor and/or the Villa writer with ‘excerpts’ read out from the letter, and listeners/viewers told they could only read the full version in that night’s paper.”
Dyson says he believes the additional publicity was generated by not realising the letter in full immediately.
His comments are well worth a read – it’s also refreshing to see an editor interact so candidly on another blog on the editorial process.
David Higgerson, Trinity Mirror’s head of multimedia, also joined in the discussion, raising a couple of points about the publication schedule of the letter and whether this impacted on traffic:
“Did we lose out by delaying publication online? We’ll never know. My gut instinct is that yes, we probably did miss a bit of traffic online but the reaction when we put it online was so great that I’ve taken it as proof that if people know the original source of information online, they’ll flock to it.
“Interestingly, the article which contained the letter had a real surge around 4pm [the time the Mail originally said it would publish the letter in full], suggesting people responded to us saying what time it would appear online. Had they read it elsewhere before? Perhaps. It’s still very well read at the moment, along with Bill Howell’s analysis.”
As witnessed by the comments on Geary’s post, finding the balance between the news demands of print and online is still up for debate. Is there a best practice for handling this kind of story – or should it be judged on a story-by-story basis?
UPDATE (May 12) – The session with Keith McSpurren will kick off at 1pm tomorrow – if you’re attending it’s in Room AG03 ground floor, College Building, City university – that’s 280 St John St, London EC1 (map here)
Liveblogging – the format of choice for news sites to cover events it would seem given recent examples.
Next week its founder Keith McSpurren is in the UK and will be coming to City University in London to talk about the good, the bad and the potential for liveblogging and news.
This is an informal and free event, from 1pm next this Wednesday (May 13).
Today’s budget announcement is being billed as the most significant of recent times given the UK’s current financial woes.
This is both a breaking news story, but one that requires closer analysis and follow up – and, perhaps most importantly, the ability to make it relevant to the reader.
So how are news organisations covering it online and who’s ticking these boxes?
In addition there’s a nice ‘What to expect’ guide breaking down the issues that are likely to feature in the budget announcement.
FT.com
Arguably the go-to site for budget coverage given its specialism, the FT is building on tried and trusted features from last year (a budget day podcast, video analysis, a budget calculator) with a new liveblog from 12pm covering Alistair Darling’s speech, editor Robert Shrimsley, who will participate, told Journalism.co.uk.
The format is based on the site’s MarketsLive feature successfully developed and used by its Alphaville blog. As such it will ‘bring people people up to speed, but inform them in an entertaining way’. Financial analysis but entertaining – two styles that rarely meet, said Shrimsley, but that will be key to FT.com’s liveblogging of the budget.
“There’s a premium on getting that information out and telling people what its means. We feel at the FT that we have the right people to pass on that analysis,” explained Shrimsley.
There will be a Twitter feed too, but it’s crucial not spam people with updates, he added. Readers are encouraged to participate in both this stream and the liveblog though.
Alphaville isn’t being used as a lab for experimenting with new ways of coverage, he stressed, but there is potential for more liveblogging across the site. It’s important not to overdose on technology, however, but to use only when applicable, he added.
“Can we offer our audience what is worth reading? There’s lots of innovation on the internet and there’s lots that you can do – that doesn’t mean you have to,” he said.
Channel 4 News website
More use of Twitter by the Channel 4 news team – as introduced by presenter Krishnan Guru-Murphy in the vid below:
Liveblogging at regional level
Deciphering what the budget means for the average news reader is being tackled head on by the Newcastle Evening Chronicle with a liveblog taking place across a number of Trinity Mirror centres.
“We’ll be mainly trying to digest it for *normal* people with rx [reactions] from experts, rather than the scary £180bn debt figures,” said Colin George, multimedia editor, in a Twitter update.
