Recent posts in my Newspapers Category

Reading pieces by Eric Jackson and Peter Kirwan yesterday leaves an awkward question hanging in the air. If Google and Facebook are really struggling with the impact of disruption to their business models from changes in trends on the internet, where does that leave media companies, many of whom haven’t really got to grips with web 1.0 yet?

Small details can tell you so much, can’t they? The Newspaper Marketing Agency haven’t updated the copyright notice on their website since 2003. Presumably because it is a GIF file.

I’ve not written much on this blog in recent months on media regulation, which used to be one of the recurring themes. It has seemed to me that whilst the Leveson inquiry and various police operations related to newspapers are ongoing, it is safer, on the personal blog of someone who works at a news organisation, to say nothing. I can’t, however, let the dissolution of the PCC pass without comment.

Here are my notes from Hacks/Hackers London meet-up where Steve Pinches from the FT gave a very open and frank talk about their work in the mobile space. He is product manager for that area, and was talking particularly about their move to HTML5 web apps and away from native apps.

François Nel’s talk about media business models at news:rewired drew a massive contrast between the fortunes, financially, of the Mail and the Guardian, and sparked a discussion about the Guardian’s digital strategy which made for some uncomfortable listening for those of us in the audience involved in trying to implement it. Here are my notes from that session - including a big disclaimer reminding you that this is a personal blog...

Last week Liz Heron gave the opening keynote address at news:rewired, explaining some of the social media work that the New York Times does, and offering some advice for those who are also involved in doing it. These are my notes from her session.

At news:rewired today I was part of a panel discussing optimising news sites for social media. I talked about the Guardian’s Facebook app. Here is an essay version of the talks.

There’s been quite a fuss around the latest set of usage figures for news websites, with comScore suggesting that Mail Online has overtaken the New York Times as the world’s leading online newspaper. The Times has taken the odd step of both disputing the figures and the relevance - saying the inclusion of thisismoney distorted the number by adding an extra million or so. Spokesperson Eileen Murphy added: “a quick review of our site versus the Daily Mail should indicate quite clearly that they are not in our competitive set.” The grey lady doth protest too much, methinks

The Washington Post’s ombudsman Patrick B. Pexton has claimed that the paper is “innovating too fast.” I should imagine it will be news to many observers of our industry that news organisations are innovating at all, let alone too fast. “I want The Post to continue to innovate” he says, ignoring the fact that many of the things he lists in his post are simply “new”, rather than innovative. And many of the problems he raises have nothing to do with technology.

Last night we threw open the Guardian’s door for “UXmas” - a chance to meet people from the UX and design teams, hear a couple of talks, and eat some mince pies before retiring to the pub.

The Guardian has just published the latest in our Guardian Shorts ebook series - “Who’s Who: Ressurection of the Doctor”. I edited the collection. And just as every episode of Doctor Who these days has a behind-the-scenes “Doctor Who Confidential” to go with it, here is the story behind the editing of the book.

We’ve had a lot of products launch over the last few weeks at the Guardian, including Android and Windows phone apps and our Facebook app, but none have been as high profile as our iPad launch. With a design team of Mark Porter, Andy Brockie, Barry Ainslie and John-Henry Barac, you wouldn’t expect it to be anything other than beautiful, and using it has changed the way that I consume news.

This is an essay version of a talk given at last week’s Hacks/Hackers meet-up in London. I presented eight things that I believe news organisations need to stop doing, start doing, or do better, in order to cope with the way that digital has transformed the news cycle.

I happen to think that if you take most community management guidelines or blogging and commenting guidelines for staff, they basically boil down to “Don’t be a dick”. In fact, I think there is quite a simple flow chart to follow if you find yourself on the wrong end of a moderation decision on a news website.

I’ve said on many occasions that I am genuinely baffled how so many news organisations seem to think they can grow an active community on their website, without investing in any community management. At the Guardian we have several people in a role called “community co-ordinator” who fulfill this remit. One of them, Laura Oliver, spoke at the last London Hacks/Hackers meet-up. Here are my notes on four of the key points that Laura made in her talk.

Andy Rutledge published a fascinating blog post last week looking at the design of digital news, and to illustrate his points he did a redux of the New York Times. Whilst appreciating the visual design, I thought there were 4 key areas where I very much disagree with Andy’s analysis, and think it would fail to engage with mainstream news readers.

I absolutely adored this nifty bit of layout in The Sun yesterday. In the top-right hand corner of page 23 was “Teed off by Beeb” - an article about how golf viewers had been complaining to the BBC. Turn over to page 24 & page 25 and - lo and behold - a two page spread advert for Sky Sports headlined “Never miss a moment”...

I posted a screengrab to Tumblr last night of the headline from The Times website which unfortunately managed to follow the formula “Live: Someone is dead”. I think it is the perfect example of something that wouldn’t be allowed to happen in print, but which hits a magic Venn diagram intersection of technology, editorial and information architecture allowing it to happen digitally.

The other week I wondered why newspapers still need a distinct name on a Sunday in a digital age. I thought I’d have a look at how the existing titles handle their URL and domain name strategy.

An interesting example of getting analogue and digital news metadata out of sync yesterday. At the moment that last night’s paper reviews were revealing The Sun’s “Brown wrong” front page splash, the online version of the story was bylined Vince Soodin. That wasn’t the case in print.

Nobody will be surprised that News International won’t want to leave a vacancy in the Sunday tabloid market for long, but the thing I am intrigued by is the choice of name.

I love lots of things about the news industry, the brands, the history, the heritage, and the way that papers take the names of communications devices or everyday things and turn them into identities.

But why, in the 21st century, you still need a different name for a paper printed on a Sunday escapes me.

At the UPA conference Susan Weinschenk talked about the paradox of choice, and that how as humans we often say that we want a wide array of choice, but actually find it bewildering when presented with it. I thought it might be worthwhile doing a quick survey of the level of choice that news homepages present to users. This table shows the number of headlines displayed to readers on the front pages of some major international news sites:

I don’t very often post to this blog just to write “Yeah! What he said”. But this is basically just that...

Yesterday I got involved in a long Twitter conversation about anonymous and pseudo-anonymous comments on news websites involving Adam L. Penenberg, Mathew Ingram, Anna Tarkov, Amrita Mathur and Brad King. It was kicked off as people responded to this piece on the issue by Mathew at Gigaom. I’ve tried to sum up the six main points I was making in bursts of slightly more than 140 characters, and I’ve tried to interweave some of the conversation.

Last night I was at the Hacks/Hackers meet-up to hear Andreas Gebhart, Stuart Myles and Evan Sandhaus talk about the proposed new IPTC semantic metadata standard rNews.

“It is ironic that you have to print the website out” someone said to me at the Knight-Mozilla News Innovation Jam at the weekend, and the Guardian’s 190th anniversary exhibition asks questions about how we preserve our digital products.

A link was doing the rounds today to a thought-provoking blog post by Donald Mahoney about journalism in a “post-content farm” world. Unfortunately, the thoughts it mostly provoked in me were: “You’ve missed the point”.

As I blogged earlier in the week, on Saturday I was at Kings Place, not for work, but to attend the Knight-Mozilla News Innovation Jam. Once the ideas generation got underway, I ended up on a team with Nicola Hughes, Jonathan Austin, David Asfaha and my colleague - and it turned out later judge - Daithí Ó Crualaoich. We ended up pitching four ideas around the theme of community.

Outside of the news industry, it sometimes seems insane that we insist on reinventing the wheel and rebuilding tools when there are free alternatives out on the web. Here are five reasons I think we do that.

The final session at news:rewired on Friday was a panel discussing the medium of live blogging, expertly hosted by Marcus Warren from the Telegraph, and featuring my colleague Guardian Blog’s Editor Matt Wells, Anna Doble of Channel 4, and Paul Gallagher of the Manchester Evening News. It was a really good session, with some good natured rivalry between the Telegraph and Guardian on display, and it really felt like the conversation has moved on from “What is live blogging and should we be doing it?” to “How can we use this new uniquely digital media to its best advantage and develop it further”.

Could it be that having a large American audience online means that the Mail is now treating issues like "The N-word" differently editorially in print and in digital?

I spent a really good day at news:rewired yesterday. With one track dedicated to data journalism, and another to social media, it was no surprise that I found plenty of things of interest. Here are my notes on some of the things that stood out for me.

I recently appeared as part of a panel session at FutureEverything talking about data journalism. I’ve already blogged the four points I was planning to make. Here are my notes from the talks given by those I was sharing the stage with: Chris Taggart, David Higgerson and Paul Bradshaw

For a while on this blog I had a Venn diagram in the top right-hand corner, which was there to remind me that I was supposed to be writing about stuff in the intersection between IA, digital media and journalism. That is where the professional communities that I belong to collide. So, it was uncomfortable to be sitting in Denver at the IA Summit last week, listening to one of my group of peers laughing loudly at the output of the other.

Echoing the rather unfortunate incident that turned the “Parents” magazine masthead into “Penis”, I found myself last week looking at this effort from the Financial Times for some time pondering whether it was about suicide or divorce, before noticing the obscured “Sp” in “How to spend it”.

“Do we want to be Journalists with a capital J and bathe in the glory of our guild, or do we want to support journalism?”. This was one of the more provocative passages of Paul Bradshaw’s inaugural lecture at City University. Yesterday I posted my notes on what he said about news organisations and communities, and in this blog post I want to look at some structural problems he identified with journalism as a profession.

The Daily Mail has published vile comments pre-judging the situation involving Iman Al-Obeidi in Libya. It is worth noting that the comments go through pre-moderation and sub-editing.

It is a couple of weeks ago now that I attended Paul Bradshaw’s inaugural lecture at City University, entitled “Is ice cream strawberry?”. Paul has made a multi-part essay version of the talk available on his blog, and you can view the slides on SlideShare. Over the next couple of blog posts on currybetdotnet there are a couple of points he made that I’d like to dwell on, and the first is about users and community.

There was another fascinating round of the debate about anonymous and pseudo-anonymous comments on newspaper websites this morning, which seemed to be primarily kicked off by Times columnist David Aaronovitch on Twitter: “Can anyone think of a reason why commenters on newspaper sites should be allowed to be anonymous, or use pseudonyms? I find the CiF comments system completely pointless, partly because of ano/pseudo-nymity. Same tedious trashers endlessly recycled.”

A couple of weeks ago at The Guardian our SEO Editorial Executive Chris Moran gave a talk about SEO to an assembled bunch of people from around the business. He said: “A lot of the opinions people have about SEO are based upon prejudice and a lack of understanding about how search engines work.”. Here are my notes from his talk.

Last week I attended an event at the Royal Statistical Society looking at data and news sourcing, and one of the panel sessions was about crowd-sourcing using the internet. My Guardian colleague and 2010 Reporter of the year Paul Lewis was one of those appearing, and he has been at the centre of a couple of investigations that have used Twitter extensively as a component of the research and reporting.

At the Guardian we've been having a series of talks looking at digital products and services. Two sessions have had a focus on the way that we use blogs on guardian.co.uk. Yesterday I posted some of my notes from a talk given by blogs editor Matt Wells, and today my notes are from another session, which featured our key political live blogger Andrew Sparrow.

In recent weeks at the Guardian there have been a series of talks looking at digital products and services. I've given one myself, and also blogged about a talk on software engineering and datajournalism by my colleague Daithí Ó Crualaoich, and the visit of Dr Sue Black to talk about Bletchley Park. Two sessions have had a focus on the way that we use blogs on guardian.co.uk, given by blogs editor Matt Wells, and political live blogger Andrew Sparrow.

We've been having a series of lunchtime talks in the Guardian about digital products and services, one of which was recently given by Daithí Ó Crualaoich, one of our developers. I've worked with Daithí on data-driven projects like the inclusion of MusicBrainz IDs and ISBNs in our Open Platform API. He has also worked on some of the high profile datajournalism projects that have appeared on guardian.co.uk in the last couple of years. In his talk he was addressing the software development part of datajournalism, and I though he made some very salient points about the relationship between the two cultures of journalism and programming.

On Wednesday I was in Leeds talking to journalism students at Leeds Trinity University College, and I was very impressed with the questions that people asked me after the presentation. Here is a summary of some of the questions and answers.

If you were at my talk in Leeds today, then here are some of the resources I mentioned during the presentation.

Yesterday I published a blog post sparked by a question after a talk I gave at the BBC World Service the other week, which was: "Do you think journalists should always read the comments underneath their articles?". One thing that seems obvious to me is this - news organisations need to have clear community management strategies if they want to have engaged communities on their sites

At the end of a talk I was giving the other week, one of the questions was: "Do you think journalists should always read the comments underneath their articles?". I have to say that my answer oscillates, and here is why...

Today is Community Manager Appreciation Day. It is a role that I believe is increasingly important to the digital news industry.

A flurry of blog posts about news sites linking out - or rather usually not linking out - prompted me to rummage around in my archives for the posts I wrote on the subject last year.

A couple of weeks ago Myressa Markham came to visit me at The Guardian. She is studying Electronic Publishing at City University London and is doing a project about the impact of mobile technology on journalism. As part of it she came in to interview me.

Lots of chatter about whether RSS is dying after this (subsequently updated and calmed down) post from Kroc Camen. Malcolm Coles has weighed in by showing that the subscription numbers to newspaper RSS feeds are way down in Google Reader with, it must be said, lots of caveats around the figures. So is RSS dead for newspaper websites, and The Guardian in particular? Not at all.

Today is the eighth anniversary of the first currybetdotnet blog post, and in what has become a tradition, here is a list of the ten most popular posts this year.

At news:rewired last week some of 'the wannabe hacks' were providing live blogging, tweeting and coverage with Storify. Catching up with them meant I finally got a chance to chat to them about their site in person.

A fascinating section in Joanna Geary's news:rewired keynote last week looked at brand loyalty, and how people happily have tattoos of company and band logos inked onto their bodies, but you never see someone with a masthead tattoo. An important feature of how we develop digital news products is now how we interact with our audience.

I love events like news:rewired for sparking lots of ideas and conversations, joining lots of dots within the industry, and generally re-kindling enthusiasm for doing digital news. Over the next few days I hope to be blogging my notes from some of the sessions, including these thoughts on why it doesn't have to be all new, all of the time.

There was a lovely short post from Joe Leech a couple of weeks back about organisations showing their underpants in their navigational structures on the web. It is unhelpful for users, and totally works against them achieving task based goals. But I think news is different, and I'm actually rather fond of flashing The Guardian's pants at the world...

I was in conversation with a friend a while back, and he was talking about the life lessons that his headmaster had tried to instill in his pupils. He had urged them to consciously pick strong character traits, and also told them to find a newspaper that suited them, and to read it every day. With the demise of print expected, does that still seem like sensible advice?

There was quite a bit of reaction to my article on The Media Briefing last week: "How the shift to mobile is revolutionising online news design".

At the risk of writing a blog post that looks like some very public sucking up to my boss, erm, you really should read the presentation my boss Mike Bracken gave to the Gartner 2010 Symposium in Orlando. The slides were posted on the Inside Guardian blog yesterday. I say it is worth reading because it has a long look at how getting key elements of openness right in your business can deliver real tangible benefits.