Online Journalism round-up

Independent to charge for bulk printing

The Independent is living up to its name by trying a different approach in the battle to generate revenue.

The blog UpYourEgo has written how the newspaper is set to charge users for printing stories from their news site.

It describes how you get the choice of a ‘free print’ where you can make up to five copies using your home or office printer for free (with an ad).

You could also make an Instant print on your home printer with six or more copies from 25p to £1 per copy without ads.

You can get a quote for customised prints with your own logo for more than 100 copies on high quality paper.

Or you can have 50+ copies printed by them and sent to you within two business days, these cost 75p to £1.10 per copy – again with no adverts.

But, suggests the blog, the system from iCopyright which offers options for printing within a popup wouldn’t stop you just copying and pasting.

There are no paywalls, so on-screen content is still free and the newspaper will have to wait and see if this makes any difference to their finances.

But, as the blog says, it is different.

(via Martin Stabe)

New guidelines published on using UGC

Alfred Hermida’s Reportr blog has an interesting story on new guidelines that have been issued by the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association, in partnership with UNESCO on how to handle user generated content.

According to Hermida, apart from covering the usual issues such as quality and any legal questions, it has sought to press the idea of UGC promoting greater media democracy.

The advice, he says, focuses not just on how to handle UGC, but also on the issue of media and information literacy.

It argues that news organisations would benefit from promoting greater media literacy, by strengthening relationships with audiences and countering claims that UGC is just a way of getting free content.

NYT app for Blackberry

Finally, whilst developing an app for an iPhone may seem old hat now, Editor and Publisher has reported that the New York Times has developed an app for the latest models of Blackberry Smartphones.

With advertiser sponsorship by UPS, the app application formats content for optimal navigation and display on BlackBerry Smartphones, offers automatic synching and allows users to store articles directly to their devices for offline reading.

"Mobile continues to be a very popular way for Times readers to access our content," Marc Frons, The New York Times Co.'s chief technology officer/digital operations, said in a statement.

"With this new application for BlackBerry Smartphones, we are offering BlackBerry users with the latest models a faster, more dynamic and more personalized experience for reading up-to-the-minute news, analysis and opinion from NYTimes.com."

The app is available here.

Citizen Journalists to be syndicated

Citizen journalism site AllVoices has launched a syndication programme to bring professional and amateur newsgatherers together, according to a report on Journalism.co.uk, following in the footsteps of the likes of AssociatedContent.com, who already pay fees to their contributors.

Content providers will now receive 75% of the money paid for non-exclusive and exclusive images and video content whilst retaining copyright of the material.

AllVoices' Chief Operating Officer Aki Hashmi told the website that they are in talks with 'traditional' media groups in the US, Europe, Middle East and south Asia.

"The syndication programme is very good news for the community; it’s very good news for traditional media, because they’re looking for global content and most of them have been very dependent on Reuters and the AP," said Hashmi.

"These have become the global providers of news, but, if you look at it, in 40 per cent of the countries they have no coverage.

"If you have a platform where you can bring professional and citizen journalists together you can have global reach."

The programme has been developed after content providers expressed an interest in monetising their material.

According to Hashimi, the technology powering the site makes publishing and distributing contributors' work online low cost, enabling the site to give the majority of any sale fee back to the user.

This follows an incentive scheme that was launched earlier this year for contributors and is the next stage in marketing the site's content, which attracts more than 3.2million unique users per month.

Sports Coverage Draws Record Traffic

Preview coverage of an all-star baseball game has given an American news site its best-ever traffic figures.

Staff at the St Louis Post-Dispatch went all out with their multimedia reporting of the classic event and reaped the rewards after recording some 2.7 million page views in a single day.

The preview coverage included blogs, video content, photos, a round-up of the latest all-star tweets and all-star game quizzes.



Editor Arnie Robbins attributed the success to the multimedia approach taken by his team.

He told Editor & Publisher: “We had a lot of cool stuff this time on the game.

“The most interesting was a video - Cardinal Culture - a six-minute video of fans who love the Cardinals.”

He added: “We have the best coverage of the All-Star game anywhere.

“Fans from the area want to know about things like traffic around the game and events, and out of towners basically are fans of the game who want to know about this game, too.”

Visit stltoday.com/allstar to see the preview reports and subsequent coverage of the game itself.

Northcliffe Unveils Local UGC Sites

The first batch of Northcliffe’s user-generated content community websites has gone live.

A total of 23 areas in the south-west of England are covered by the network of websites listed on the localpeople.co.uk hub page.



Towns covered by the UGC sites include: Newton Abbot, Falmouth, Dorchester and Weston Super Mare.

HoldtheFrontPage.co.uk reports that the new sites are devoted entirely to content from users and are monitored by paid community publishers rather than journalists.

The community publishers are tasked with encouraging visitors to submit their own news and notices and with moderating content.



The director of strategy at Associated Northcliffe Digital said the new sites will complement the company’s established network of news websites, which cover larger areas.

“Our view is that while these sites are quite complementary to the thisis sites they are actually quite different,” said Roland Bryan.

“They are not news-led propositions, they are community-led propositions.”

He also stated that the websites will “create a genuinely user-generated approach to local content, giving local people an online forum to discuss and debate relevant issues with other locals, and shape opinion in their community”.

The network launch was announced by Northcliffe back in May, when the company also revealed that a further 20 sites are to be unveiled later this year.

Find out more about the network of community sites at localpeople.co.uk.

How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Headlines

What if poets wrote the news?

In a bold experiment with user-generated content, Israel's influential Haaretz newspaper sent most of its reporters home on Wednesday and turned 31 of the nation's authors and poets loose to fill the pages.

The idea behind the paper’s June 10 special edition was to honour Israel’s annual Hebrew Book Week by inviting Israeli authors to bear witness to the events of the day, according to an article in the Jewish Daily Forward.

While a few journalists stayed in the newsroom in case of breaking news (nothing major happened), the paper was filled with articles by the poets and novelists, from the lead headline to the weather report.

"We really tried to give a real newspaper," Haaretz editor-in-chief Dov Alfon said. "Thirty-one writers decided, what are the real events of the day? What is really important in their eyes? They wrote about it, and our priorities as journalists were suddenly shaken by this."

Haaretz, founded in 1918, is the nation's oldest Hebrew-language daily. Its brand has been distinguished by "highlighting Israeli cultural, literary and artistic life with a vigor unmatched by its competitors," the Forward's Daniel Estrin writes. It has a relatively small but elite national audience of around 50,000, bolstered by an international audience for its English-language online edition.

A sampling of the contributions from the nation's literary lights to the special Wednesday edition:

* Renowed novelist David Grossman spent a night at a children's drug rehab centre in Jerusalem and wrote a front-page story about tender exchanges among the patients. His article ends: "I lay in bed and thought wondrously how, amid the alienation and indifference of the harsh Israeli reality, such islands — stubborn little bubbles of care, tenderness and humanity — still exist."

* 79-year-old novelist Yoram Kaniuk, a cancer patient, wrote about couples in a hospital cancer ward. "A woman walking with a cane brings her partner a cup of coffee with a trembling hand. The looks they exchange are sexier than any performance by Madonna and cost a good deal less," he wrote. "I think about what would happen if I were to get better ... how I would live without the human delicacy to which I am witness?"

* There were lighter contributions, too. For instance, it's always hot during the summer in Israel, so what's new to say? A weather report in the form of a poem by Roni Somek drew on a metaphor: "Summer is the pencil/that is least sharp/in the seasons’ pencil case."

* And finally, there was the stock market summary from author Avri Herling. It read: "Everything’s okay. Everything’s like usual. Yesterday trading ended. Everything’s okay. The economists went to their homes, the laundry is drying on the lines, dinners are waiting in place ..."

Telegraph Adds User-Generated Newswire

The Daily Telegraph has subscribed to Demotix, a user-generated newswire that allows anyone to post stories and pictures from around the world, the Press Gazette reports.

The Demotix Widget appears on the World News page of Telegraph.co.uk, providing images and news stories from its 5,600 users in 120 countries around the world.

The deal is the first in the UK, but the Telegraph joins Le Monde in France, Lebanon’s Future News and the Himalayan Times of Nepal.

"For Demotix, this is really exciting," said CEO Turi Munthe. "The Telegraph was our very earliest supporter and immediately understood what we were trying to achieve. As for our contributors, the chance to get their stories out to so many people in the UK, US, Canada and elsewhere is fantastic. Demotix was founded to give a loudspeaker to the man and woman on the street. With this partnership, their voices just got louder."

Demotix is a 2009 winner of a MediaGuardian Innovation Award in the independent media category.

Northcliffe Set to Trial Hyperlocal Sites

Thirty new local Northcliffe sites combining citizen journalism, blogging and Facebook-style social networking will go live next month, according to an item posted to journalism.co.uk.

The initial six-month trial of hyperlocal websites will target towns with populations of 10,000 to 40,000 people that currently have no dedicated local newspaper or website, said Seamus McCauley, strategic analyst at Associated Northcliffe Digital.

"There is a real fear in the journalism industry about the future of local newsgathering. This at the moment is our hope for the answer," McCauley told an audience at City University. "In every town, there will already be a person who writes match reports for football games, businesses who like to talk about their work, churches who host events every week. We want to co-ordinate that activity."

He said the sites will be overseen by "community publishers", whose role will be to keep discussion live and active, oversee content, and provide fresh information. "To make this work, it's crucial to have people on the ground who can find, generate and curate the content," McCauley said.

The sites will be powered by social networking software and by Northcliffe's own news generation facilities. A central moderation team will monitor output across the network and advise the community publishers.

The 30 sites scheduled to launch in June will be concentrated in the southwest of England, from Gloucestershire to Cornwall, including 10 towns around Bristol.

McCauley said the new hyperlocal sites would not compete with its existing network of regional websites under the "thisis" brand. Northcliffe also publishes a series of postcode sites, automatically fed by content from a local title.

"In every town, sooner or later a big issue comes up, and local people will try and knock up a website very quickly. We want to set up these sites so that when an issue arises, they're already there," he said. "But they will also be a place to discuss minor issues and news. Newswires don't localise to that level, and there are no aggregators that provide anything sensible for smaller towns.

"The question is, can we get a certain proportion of a town's population onto each site? This launch will show us."

Compelling Community Content

A blueprint for community newspapers in today's media environment, offered by Steve Buttry of Gazette Communications in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is attracting a lot of attention.

The `C3' or `Complete Community Connection' plan, as summarized by Nieman Journalism Lab (and available in full from Scribd), is an implementation of ideas that Buttry developed while working on the Newspaper Next project at the American Press Institute.

Although it is a family-owned paper, the Gazette is otherwise very comparable to UK regional newspapers such as the Lancashire Evening Post or other Johnston Press dailies.

Among the areas around which Buttry suggests compelling community content can be created are:

* Driving: Features such as gas price mapping, traffic text alerts, databases on bridge inspections, parking offenders, gas pump inspections and a pothole map `can help drivers and car owners regularly over time.'

* Home: `Answerbases' can be created on such topics as property taxes, sales transactions, mortgage foreclosures, delinquencies and ratings of contractors.

* Conversation: Buttry urges newspapers to immerse themselves in social networking: incorporating blogs and Facebook Connect, developing discussion leaders to turn commenting into conversation, and offering rewards for high-value contributors.

* Calendar: A great calendar ('what's on') system is central to the idea of facilitating transactions such as reservations and ticket sales, he says.

* Local Knowledge: In Buttry’s vision, this entails a `place where people of our communities and perhaps across Iowa turn for answers to their questions about this state and its communities: databases, community resources, services, history, unique aspects of local life (attractions, institutions and events) and a user-generated encyclopedia of local knowledge.'

* Personal content opportunities: These include expanded user-contributed content areas for births, milestones, school, graduations, college life, military service, weddings, parenthood, divorce, jobs, health, pets, food, interests, retirement and other stages of life.

Buttry's blog contains the complete blueprint in a series of posts. It's well worth a read.

Democratic Leaders

In a trial project launched this week, the Financial Times is asking readers to contribute to future leader columns by debating topics on its new Arena blog.

FT writers initiate a debate; for example, the first one is on whether taxes should be raised permanently or only temporarily. Readers are invited to comment at the end of each post from the journalists, who then select the best comments and add them to the main blog.

Next Monday, the editorial team will use readers' comments as part of their leader conference, responding to reader views in that day's leader both in the paper and online.

`I've long wanted to share the quality of the debates we have inside the building with our readers. This way we get to go one step further and invite them to participate,' FT.com managing editor Robert Shrimsley says on the Guardian Media website.

`Our community of readers is perhaps the most sophisticated in the business world, and this is a chance to draw on their expertise and invite them into the editorial process at the highest level.'

Tittering over Twitter

Well, it was a good thought. The Telegraph experimented Monday with opening up its Budget 2009 page to live Twitter messages ... briefly.

Twitter users flocked to the site as word spread that comments including "#budget" were automatically being posted. But -- and this is hard to believe, but true nonetheless -- many of them did not actually want to talk about the budget.

The twittered messages (as reported in the Guardian, on the journalism.co.uk blog and elsewhere), included:

* "I love a party with a happy atmosphere, so let me take you there and you and I'll go dancing in the cool night air #budget."

* "Jacqui Smith ate my hamster ... and claimed it on expenses! You couldn't make it up! #budget"

* "Well that's the Telegraph's #budget twitterfeed boned. What shall we destroy next?"

The Telegraph gave things a quick rethink. The live feed vanished.

But the short-lived fun was more evidence of Twitter's rapid rise in popularity among UK users. Earlier this month, Hitwise reported that for the week ending 14 March 2009, the Twitter.com homepage received more hits than that of the Telegraph -- or the Guardian or the Times or the Sun. In fact, of the main newspaper homepages, only the Daily Mail received more UK Internet visits than Twitter, which also overtook Google News UK.

However, Twitter also giveth back some of what it taketh away. One of the major drivers of traffic to news websites now is ... Twitter. Hitwise reports that during February 2009, almost 10% of Twitter's downstream traffic went to news and media websites -- and more than 40% of that went to print sites.

NYT Readers Capture Hard Times

People are sharing their experiences of financial hardship via a new user-generated content initiative from the New York Times.

Picturing the Recession asks readers to submit photos which capture the signs of economic troubles in their homes, neighbourhoods and towns.

The result is an extensive gallery of interesting and often moving photos showing the effects of the global financial crisis on people’s everyday lives.



Subjects vary from empty fridges to closed shops, boarded-up houses and make-shift homes in tents and under motorways.



Pictures are grouped into categories - Business, Home, Sacrifice, Family, Work and Transportation.

The NYT invites submissions from users around the world and asks potential contributors: “How do you see the recession playing out in your community? What signs of hardship or resilience stand out? How are you or your family personally affected?”

[HT – Journalism.co.uk]

Twitter App Delivers News To Journalists

The creators behind a new Twitter application hope it will provide a “communication channel for people to reach journalists with news”.

Nyouse (pronounced news) is the brainchild of freelance copywriter Leif Kendall and app developer Jon Markwell and aims to divert news tweets to reporters.



Speaking to Journalism.co.uk, Kendall said Nyouse provides a way for “ordinary people to alert the press” about stories that no-one else is covering.

He added: “It really takes two groups of people to understand the process and use it.”

It requires Twitterers to label their tweets with the #nyouse label or send them to @nyouse.

They can then be picked up by journalists who visit nyouse.com or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Sun Becomes UK’s Online No.1

The Sun online has become the most popular national newspaper website in the UK after attracting more than 27 million unique users last month.

Year-on-year comparisons show thesun.co.uk increased traffic by 118.2%, a leap which saw the News International title move from fifth to first in the order of most visited online newspapers.

The release of ABCe monthly data shows that guardian.co.uk fell from first to third, Telegraph.co.uk remained in second and Times Online and dailymail.co.uk are fourth and fifth respectively.



Speaking to Press Gazette, The Sun’s online editor attributed the site’s growth to a number of factors.

Pete Picton said: “It’s a combination of things - great stories, great content, increased promotional activity and increased site optimization.”

“If you’ve got great content, it’s being linked to by a lot more places than it was,” he added, in reference to the site’s increase in referrals from social media sites like Digg.

Picton also pointed out that the user-generated content zone MySun and the Sun Woman section of the site saw record traffic last month.



Several high-profile stories also helped thesun.co.uk to break web traffic records, including the exclusive about an alleged baby-faced dad and the ‘bong’ photo of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps.

Read more about this story on guardian.co.uk.

[Graph from Press Gazette]

Chronicle & Echo Launches Film Comp

Local film-makers have the chance to earn some recognition as the Northampton Chronicle & Echo launches its annual short film competition.

Supported by industry groups such as 20th Century Fox and Reelscape Films, the contest invites people to submit five-minute films shot in the county which will be judged by both a specialist panel and the public.

Film Northants 2009 invites submissions via its website for the three categories – fiction, non-fiction and schools, reports HoldTheFrontPage.co.uk .

Entries will be displayed on the website and the judging panel will then select a shortlist from which visitors will select the three winners.

The finalists will also see their films make the big screen at a special ceremony at a Vue Cinema in September.

Prizes include a flat-screen TV, passes for the cinema and places on workshops with industry figures.

Further details can be found on northamptonchron.co.uk .

[Disclosure – The Northampton Chronicle & Echo is a Johnston Press publication.]

Patch Launches NJ Hyperlocals

New Jersey residents are spoiled for choice with hyperlocal news coverage as another three sites are launched.

Just a couple of weeks after the New York Times went live with its community news sites in New Jersey, the newly-created Patch.com unveiled its websites covering Maplewood, South Orange and Millburn.

According to Lost Remote, each Patch platform is “deeper than NYT’s effort, featuring a business directory, video and data mapping, to name a few”.

The sites also offer interactive events listings and announcements, searchable directories of local restaurants, local facts sections and links to schools and colleges in the area.



According to its About Us page: “Patch is a new way to find out about, and participate in, what’s going on near you.

“We’re a community-specific news and information platform dedicated to providing comprehensive and trusted local coverage for individual towns and communities.”

Funded by private investors the Polar Capital Group, Patch.com is managed and staffed by media professionals and has plans to become a nationwide network in the future.

A Face Behind Anon Comments

An interview with a regional news website’s anonymous comment poster provides a valuable insight into why people comment online.

Former Birmingham Post development editor Joanna Geary has published a video interview with the active user in a bid to learn more about online news from the perspective of a commenter.

On her blog, Geary asserts that both journalists and posters can learn something about each other and themselves when they engage in a face-to-face dialogue about their respective positions.

For example, she notes that the commenter had “developed quite a bit of a reputation as a curmudgeon”, and yet, “the man I met in reception could not have been further from what I expected - polite, erudite, passionate and engaged in local news”.

She adds: “For his part, he was oblivious to the image he had been portraying to others online.

“Of course the wider point is that those who engage on the internet need to remember there are humans behind the handles (or bylines) and try and think about how their comments might be taken.”

Visit Geary’s Thoughts of a UK Regional Newspaper Journalist to see the 15-minute interview and full post.

NYT Launches Community Sites

Residents living in five New York neighbourhoods are being encouraged to write stories for two new community sites on nytimes.com.

The citizen journalism websites form part of a New York Times pilot project and will be launched this week.

According to Editor & Publisher, two websites will cover news from five communities in New Jersey and Brooklyn.

NYT staff will oversee the sites but the content – from articles to photos and videos – will come from people living within the areas.

And the newspaper’s editor for digital initiatives revealed that the overseers have already been busy recruiting volunteers ahead of launch.

“They have each recruited initial contributors and the mission of their sites will be to encourage and instigate people in their communities to do their own reporting and contribute their own creativity to the community we are trying to build online,” said Jim Schachter.

He added that the new sites are not intended to replace community coverage produced by professional journalists but they represent instead “a grassroots effort, to see if there is a new kind of journalism we can be part of”.

Schachter concluded: “There are ‘place’ blogs everywhere. We have to create a real quality community that figures out the answers to questions on the minds of people in each place.”

See Editor & Publisher for the full story.

Users Set Agenda At Patriot-News

Readers are getting their chance to dictate which stories a regional news reporter will cover in Pennsylvania.

Patriot-News journalist Daniel Victor is asking the audience for their ideas on which stories they would like to see him write about for both the newspaper and its online presence – PennLive.com.

Victor says that users will be able to submit their ideas via a comments section on the blog and he will then put these proposals together into a poll form where all web visitors can vote on them.

The beatblogging.org participant says the idea behind the blog is to build a community and to enable the audience to interact directly with their newspaper.

He writes: “Our role is shifting; we are not just story-tellers, we are community-builders. Harnessing the power of the Web is a crucial part of that.”

And he believes that using a blog as the platform for this project is a good way to attract people who maybe haven’t contributed much in the past.

“My theory, which I’m eager to test out, is that there are a lot of level-headed readers out there who may at times be intimidated by PennLive.

“Those people have a tremendous amount of value to contribute to the community if their voices are heard. They have stories that deserve to be told.”

He adds: “You don’t need to be a citizen journalist or have your own blog to leave a comment on a news site that would be valuable to your community.”

[HT – The Editors Weblog]

Trinity Adds UGC To Mobile Sites

Trinity Mirror is preparing to add a user-generated content feature to its existing mobile sites.

According to HoldTheFrontPage.co.uk, the addition of UGC forms part of the second phase in the development of the publisher’s m sites.

The mobile sites are also set to offer mobile users a selection of ringtones from a downloads centre and various wallpaper options.

Launched in October last year, Trinity’s network of mobile sites includes m sites for The Chronicle (Newcastle) and the Liverpool Daily Post.

Video Channel Launched For Henley

A channel devoted to video content has been unveiled by the website for the Henley Standard.

Entitled HSOtv, the channel promises to host all the “latest broadcasts” from South Oxfordshire.



Press Gazette reports that new videos are uploaded weekly and describes the current crop of content as impressive.

Among the packages available to view on the site are an interview with one of the stars from the West End production of Oliver!, an interview with Angie Best and footage from the funeral of writer Sir John Mortimer.

The Standard is now looking into developing the section to enable users to contribute their own videos.