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African Cup of Nations online coverage review: Part 4 - British and American online newspapers
I started this series looking at some of the British press coverage in print of the African Cup of Nations, and today I wanted to look a little bit further at online coverage in the main papers. My impression - and this is an unscientific one - is that there has been more coverage of the tournament than in previous years. I think this is in part because it allows news organisations to gear up for covering another football...
How to make friends and influence people in The Guardian office this morning...
...use the nice new Oystercard wallet that The Times were giving away outside Kings Cross station last night....
Live-blogging the BNP on Question Time across the web
Live-blogging the BNP on Question TimeA look at how newspapers and political blogs covered Nick Griffin's BBC appearance online.
Times 7am offer short-changed by odd marketing short-code?
If you've been on the tube in London recently, you'll probably have noticed a big marketing push by The Times going on at the moment. One of the components is an opportunity to get the paper delivered to your door before 7am if you live within the M25 area. One thing I noticed about the campaign - they have an easy to remember URL for the offer: timesonline.co.uk/7am. There is also a SMS shortcode, which asks you to send the...
"Bang Bang" - What B.A. Robertson can teach the news industry about the price of scarcity
With varying announcements about potential future paid-for-content models from the FT and News International titles, there has been a resurgence in the debate about getting people to pay for visiting newspaper websites. Malcolm Coles yesterday wrote a great blog post looking at ways that News International could succeed in monetising their content. I think it addresses a lot of issues and niche content that does exist, that the naysayers of the 'information wants to be free' crowd tend to sweep...
Newspapers on the go - The Times and The Telegraph
Back in March The Guardian launched a specifically formatted mobile version of the site at m.guardian.co.uk. At the time I thought it might be worth having a quick poke around to see what other newspapers in the UK were doing with their sites in the mobile space. Since then it seems that I've been at so many different digital media and journalism events or gigs that I never got round to blogging about what I saw. Here are some of...
Wireframing the front page: Part 4 - The Times
This week I've been looking at various ways of comparing the newspaper printed front page with their online equivalents. Yesterday I looked closely at the Daily Mail and the Mail Online, and today I want to look at The Times. The Times We can see a big contrast here between The Times print and web incarnations. 72% of the surface area of the printed front page is given over to carrying stories. By contrast, only a quarter of the online...
Wireframing the front page: Part 1 - The "homepage"
I've been giving a lot of thought to the way that people navigate through newspaper websites, and it has made me consider the different functions that the homepage and the front page serve. Navigation, for example, is mostly redundant on the printed front page. Occasionally a paper might have something like "Turn to Page 7" to link to the continuation of a story, or a promo for the sports section, but generally the front page functions to sell one major...
Navigating newspapers: Part 5 - The 'quality press'
During the course of the last few days I've been publishing a series of posts looking at how 9 leading UK newspaper websites present their navigation to their audience. Yesterday I was looking in-depth at the layouts on the 'red top' and 'middle market' papers. Today I want to look at the online incarnations of the 'quality' press. The Guardian One of the distinguishing features of navigation from the 'quality press' is the prominence of comment, opinion and columnists in...
Invading copyright is just a game for The Times
The Times had an online feature at the weekend celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the Space Invaders game that did so much to popularise electronic arcade gaming when I was a youngster. Embedded in the feature was a widget allowing you to replay your wasted youth. This is, of course, the forward thinking kind of use of multimedia on newspaper websites that I would usually be full of praise for. There was just one teensy problem. The opening screen of...
'Sorry - this page cannot be found': How newspapers handle 404 errors - Part 2
A comment when I started my recent 'Newspaper Site Search Smackdown' series of posts prompted me to go and have a look at which British newspapers use sitemap.xml files. As it turned out, it was only the Daily Mail and The Scotsman which I noticed, although The Telegraph and The Mirror and Metro have them as well. It meant that I got to have a close look at the 404 error pages generated by the others. I thought it might...
Newspaper "Site Search Smackdown": Round 4 - The Daily Express vs The Times
I'm running a series of smackdowns between British newspaper site search engines, to test how fresh their indexing is. The Daily Mail triumphed over The Sun in Round 1, and in Round 2, The Independent emerged victorious over The Telegraph, getting a perfect 10 out of 10 in the process. Yesterday was a low scoring Round 3, with The Guardian just edging out The Mirror, by 7 points to 6. Today I'll be finishing off the inter-newspaper contests with...
Google hijacks traffic from newspaper site search
There has been a controversy over the last couple of weeks about Google's introduction of 'Search in search' boxes. For some large web properties who appear at #1 for their brand name, Google has been adding a search box underneath their listing, allowing users to refine their search to get results for just the one domain. Amazon and Flickr are a couple of examples of where this has been introduced, although Amazon seem to have got the feature squashed. I...
The ripples of the Zahopoulos scandal reach The Times
I mentioned last week the Zahopoulos scandal - or Maximougate as people keep calling it here. There have been fresh developments in Greece daily. Last weekend a Sunday paper published some still images from the sex DVD that allegedly features the Culture Mininstry official Christos Zahopoulus, who tried to commit suicide before Christmas. Now, the two owners of the paper in question - Proto Thema - have fallen out over allegations that one of them was promised that, if the...
Not qualifying for Euro2008 - as it happened in Greece
I already had one Euro2008 slap in the face when UEFA didn't grant me any tickets to return to Salzburg to watch a couple of games staged in a place where, this time last year, I was living. And then there was the Croatia game. The comedy of errors here in Crete was nowhere near as bad as Scott Carson's competitive debut, but I thought I should share. According to the Athens News, Greek channel ΝΕΤ were showing the...
How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 8 - The Times
I've been looking at how accessible British newspaper websites are, testing the most popular online papers against a set of criteria. So far I've looked at the Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Guardian, Independent, The Sun and The Telegraph. Today, I'm looking at the accessibility of The Times website. Text resize The Times, along with The Mirror and The Guardian was one of only 3 out of the 8 newspapers I tested who allowed users to resize their text...
Telegraph nails England Rugby World Cup Final colours to their mast(head)
By the time Saturday comes around, I suspect you won't be able to move in England for printed supplements about the England teams appearance in the Rugby World Cup Final in Paris. In the meantime, the war for the nation's patriotic attention is being played out online. Even with the distraction of this afternoon's crunch Euro2008 qualifier against Russia in a different type of football, most of the newspapers online have lots of Rugby World Cup features, and 'Rugby'...
A tour of Tour De France news sites - Abandons: CNN, The Times and The Independent
Since my exposure to live coverage of the Tour De France in Greece has been restricted to occasionally popping down to a nearby bar which shows Eurosport on satellite, I've mostly been following the now drugs-tainted 2007 edition on the internet. This week I've been reviewing the sites that I have been using, and have so far looked at the official site, state and semi-state broadcasters France 24 and The BBC, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and Eurosport's online partnership with...
Times Online WBLG oddity
Whilst I was doing my recent survey of the Web 2.0 features on British newspaper websites I spotted one or two quirks which I wanted to highlight. The Times has a very curious approach to putting titles to their blog feeds. For some reason, as well as the bizarre CSS in their recent redesign, it seems someone decided they needed to append 'WBLG' to the title of every weblog. Occasionally I spotted the odd variation where weblog was written out...
Who benefits financially from the Madeleine McCann publicity juggernaut?
I noticed towards the end of this week that, alongside the rumours of journalist frolics in Portugal whilst following the Madeleine McCann case, a couple of columnists have broken rank with the default position of their newspaper. Today on The Time's site Stefanie Marsh has been called "a very lonely, sad, selfish person" for her piece "I confess: I have not been agonising about Madeleine". There has been disquiet expressed in the Telegraph, and yesterday it was Amanda Platell...
The Times RSS feeds are broken
Newspapers 2.0: How Web 2.0 is The Times?
William Rees-Mogg in The Times on Jerry Springer and Muslims
BBC staff place advert in The Telegraph
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"Journalism in the digital age"
I'll be appearing on a panel with Sarah Hartley and Iain Hepburn at the Edinburgh International Science Festival on Sunday April 11th. More details...
Posts of the moment
Day of the Triffids
If everyone suddenly went blind, how long would the Internet survive, and could you still publish news on it?
With professionals of this quality, who needs 'citizen journalist' enemies?
It is hard to argue that ethics and quality set the 'professional journalist' apart from the amateur blogger, if the 'professional' keeps publishing articles so wrong that they have to be deleted.
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