Mirror Launching Footie Site

A website dedicated to the beautiful game is set to be launched this year by Trinity Mirror.


The standalone multimedia site will feature text, video and photographic content from matches, reports the Guardian.

It will have a breaking news feed, blogs, and plenty of special features, such as a weekly video report from the ever popular Robbie Savage and a daily soccer show.

Fans will also be able to access a treasure trove of Mirror Group photographs capturing the highs and lows of English football over the decades.

MirrorFootball.co.uk is scheduled to go live this summer, in time for the start of the new season.

[Photo by Atomic Shed on Flickr.]

Kent Paper Launching War Archive

Life in Kent during the Second World War is the focus of a new digital archive poised to go online this autumn.

From September, visitors to Kent Online will be able to view thousands of articles and photographs published by the Kent Messenger during the war.

According to HoldtheFrontPage.co.uk, the archive will also have advertisements from the time and a search function enabling users to search by dates, places and names.

“The KM’s war pages provide a first-hand account of every day life as well as the remarkable courage and tenacity of the people in Medway and Kent who endured so much for so long,” said Ron Green, managing editor of the KM Group.

Meanwhile, web users who fancy a read of something a little older should take a look at a new online newspaper archive from the British Library.



The British Newspapers 1800-1900 digital archive houses over two million pages from local and national newspapers published during the course of the century.

Find out more from the British Library website and on HoldtheFrontPage.co.uk.

North-East Paper Plans Digital Archive

One of the UK’s oldest independent newspapers is to make thousands of past editions open to the public through an online archive project.

Issues of the Teesdale Mercury dating back to the mid-nineteenth century will be uploaded to the digital store, as the newspaper plans to make over 5,000 editions available online.

Supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund to the tune of £35,000, the Teesdale Mercury Access Project will produce a searchable archive which can be accessed by people from around the world.

Speaking to HoldtheFrontPage.co.uk, project chairman Roy Tranter said the initiative would preserve the newspaper for future generations.

“The Teesdale Mercury has played such an important role over the years in documenting Teesdale life and events that have happened, it would be an awful tragedy if those records were lost.”

The Teesdale Mercury began publication in 1854.

[Photo - by abbyladybug on Flickr]

NYT Bids For Crowdsourcing Funds

The New York Times is looking to launch a crowdsourcing initiative enabling the public to read and analyse government documents.

In partnership with the investigative journalism outfit Pro Publica, the Times is seeking $1 million (£640,000) from the Knight News Challenge to fund DocumentCloud, according to Nieman Journalism Lab.

The project would encourage news media to upload their source materials into a document viewer where members of the public could read, share and store pages and paragraphs.

This interactive DocViewer software was developed by the NYT’s technologies team to create a searchable database of schedules relating to Hillary Clinton’s spell as first lady.

According to the grant application, DocumentCloud “will accelerate the daily work of investigative reporters, and will make investigative reporters out of every citizen, by improving the way we find, share, read and collaborate on source documents online”.

[HT – Editors Weblog.]

Americans Take Cameras To Polls

Voters in tomorrow’s US elections are being encouraged to film their voting experiences and post them online.

YouTube and PBS have teamed up to launch the Video Your Vote channel, where users can upload and share their election films.

And the pick of the user-generated content will be broadcast on a PBS election programme, reports CyberJournalist.net.

Users categorise their videos into groups such as “Voter Intimidation”, “Voting Perspectives” and “Polling Place Projects,” and they are then displayed as pins on a Google map.



The channel makes clear that it wants a broad range of videos, rather than just a visual record of people’s votes.

“Shoot a video of your voting experience before or on Election Day. Document the energy and excitement, as well as any problems you may see.”

The channel has a significant number of videos already submitted, many under the “Early Voting” tag.

And among the most popular is this video (almost 90,000 views so far) showing the voting experience of An American Abroad.

Google Opens Newspaper Archive

Search giant Google has launched a new feature which enables users to read newspapers from the past online.

Google News Archive Search is designed to bring readers digitised copies of printed newspapers in their original layouts.

The Google Blog reveals that the new initiative will allow users to search by event, headline, photograph or advertisement in order to find the archive article they’re looking for.

Readers can access the search through Google News and results will also bring up archived editions housed on the websites of participating newspapers, such as the New York Times.

However, many of these are on a pay-per-view service and visitors looking for free historical content should use the advanced search option and select No Prices.

I tested out the search by using the term D-Day Landings and opting for free archive content only.



Within the first ten results were links to scanned versions of original news stories about the landings from newspapers such as the St Petersburg Times and the Evening Independent.

The pages open in the Google News Archive window, where you can zoom in or out and browse other pages from the issue.



And this represents only the tip of the iceberg of Google’s ambitions with archive newspapers and magazines.

The blog post explains: “This effort is just the beginning. As we work with more and more publishers, we’ll move closer towards our goal of making those billions of pages of newsprint from around the world searchable, discoverable, and accessible online.”

More Northcliffe Sites Go Hyperlocal

Another batch of Northcliffe newspapers has relaunched online as part of the publisher’s rollout of new-look sites.

HoldtheFrontPage.co.uk reports that a further 46 revamped websites have gone live across the UK in the past week.

One of the key changes is the integration of new hyperlocal channels for neighbourhood and community news.

For example, the new thisiscroydontoday site enables users to access news specific to hyperlocal areas such as Waddon, South Croydon and Purley.

Another major change is the introduction of new software for archiving so stories can remain on the site permanently.

Northcliffe spokesman Robert Hardie said this development means it would be possible for the company to make public its archived articles dating from the mid 1990s onwards.

New Tools Tell Vegas Story

A multimedia project chronicling the history of Las Vegas has been launched by a regional newspaper.

Staff and university interns worked for almost six months on the large-scale feature, which tells the story of Vegas and many of its big name associates.

“The History of Fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada” boasts video documentaries, archive film, a timeline and an interactive map introducing the city’s many casinos.

It also has podcasts, hundreds of archive photographs as well as new and “vintage” articles about all aspects of the city, from its relations to the Mob to atomic bomb tests.

And the crowning glory of the project has to be the 11-part video documentary, “Boomtown: The Story Behind Sin City”, which charts the development of Vegas decade-by-decade.

The newspaper’s new media managing editor explains the practicalities behind putting the history together in this post to the Digital Edge blog.

Daily Mail Beta - 7 Pluses

A beta version of the Daily Mail website is now online and open for feedback from users.

The Mail is using the test site to try out some new ideas so net consultant and blogger Martin Belam has provided a list of the seven things he likes about it.

1 - Picture Panel

A prominent part of the new design is a photo panel in the centre of the top of the homepage which rotates several images throughout the day and enables users to link directly through to the stories.

2 - Soft Focus

Belam says the new site places stronger emphasis on lighter stories branded as Femail with the right-hand column devoted to stories on style and showbiz news, although he says it could run the risk of becoming a downmarket version of its print counterpart.

3 - Headlines Archive

This new addition chronologically lists every story published each day, categorised by section.

Belam writes that it’s “a useful variation on the section-based browse mechanism used across the rest of the site”.

4 - Polls

The site has a page dedicated to user opinion polls.

“Casting a vote is a satisfying user experience, with a great big custom tick appearing across the check-boxes on the form.”

5 - Quirky Stuff

The homepage has a photo strip called “Fancy That”, featuring picture-led stories of the weird and wonderful from around the world.

“It is a very visual way of showcasing quirky content that is likely to generate click-throughs.”

6 - Clippings

Users can create their own page of personalised content page by making clippings of up to 50 their favourite articles.

7 - Beta Better

“I love the fact that it is a Beta. Not many mainstream media organisations have been brave enough to engage with widespread testing of new designs on their audience in this way.”