Author Archive
Newspapers, reflections
Some notes on the newspaper
In the early years of the twenty-first century a newspaper looks like a clumsy thing. Outdated within hours, virtually worthless after its first purchase, expensive to produce, impossible to correct, difficult to distribute and, shortly afterwards, to destroy.
Not so 300 years ago. While everyone is arguing over the end of newspapers, it is quite interesting to also have a look at their beginnings.
At the start of the 1700s the newspaper was considered a great technological step forward. London led the way and by the middle of the century there were as many as 130 regional publications in circulation across the country. The newspaper had become an institution.
More than merely reporting happening events, newspapers provided useful information about meetings, prices – especially of corn and wheat – trade returns, bills of mortality and adverts.
Here’s an article from early on in the century, describing the bizarre effects that newspapers had on some obsessives:
(From the Bristol Mercury, 2 Aug. 1712)
About 1695 the press was again set to work, and such a furious itch of novelty has ever since been the epidemical distemper, that it has proved fatal to many families, the meanest of shopkeepers… spending whole days in coffee houses to hear news and talk politics, whilst their wives and children wanted bread at home, and their business being neglected, they were themselves thrown into gaol or forced to take sanctuary in the army.
By the end of the century, the newspaper’s place was so entrenched in society that the poet and naturalist George Crabbe was motivated to write a nimble poem in their honour:
I sing of NEWS, and all those vapid sheets
The rattling hawker vends through gaping streets;
Whate’er their name, whate’er the time they fly ;
Damp from the press, to charm the reader’s eye
- G. Crabbe – the Newspaper (1785)
A flaw, perhaps?
But at the same time other were noticing that newspapers were not without fault. The fact that each day they had to be filled to the same degree and length was seen as clumsy by some – one of whom was Henry Fielding, who wrote early on in The History of Tom Jones (Book II, Ch I)
Thought we have properly enough entitled this our work, a history, and not a life; nor an apology for a life, as is more in fashion; yet we intend in it rather to pursue the method of those writer, who profess to disclose the revolution of countries, than to imitate the painful and voluminous historian who, to preserve the regulatory of his series, thinks himself obliged to fill up as much paper with the detail of months and years in which nothing remarkable happened, as he employs upon those notable areas when the greatest scenes have been transacted on the human stage.
Such histories as these do, in reality, very much resemble a newspaper, which consists of just the same number of words, whether there be any news in it or not. They might likewise be compared to a stage coach, which performs constantly the same course, empty as well as full. The writer, indeed, seems to think himself obliged to keep even pace with time, whose amanuensis he is,
Now it is our purpose, in the ensuing pages, to pursue a contrary method. When any extraordinary scene presents itself (as we trust will often be the case), we shall spare no pains nor paper to open it at large to our reader; but if whole years should pass without producing anything worthy his notice, we shall not be afraid of a chasm in our history; but shall hasten on to matters of consequence, and leave such periods of time totally unobserved.
My reader then, is not to be surprised, if, in the course of this work, he shall find some chapter very short, and others altogether as long; some that contain only the time of a single day, and others that comprise years; in a word, if my history sometimes seems to stand still, and sometimes to fly…
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These are some notes from an essay I have to write on the earliest days of the newspaper. Most of the examples come from Asa Briggs’ book – How They Lived – and the photo at the top is from mofotos‘ Flickr stream.
A Staffordshire shake up
Spring cleaning
With a few afternoon hours on a public holiday to spare, I thought it would be a fine thing to give My Digital Notebook’s design a bit of a shake up. And with bigger pictures, videos and slideshows, I think that this theme works rather nicely.
For the last five weekends I have been back at my parents’ home in Staffordshire having a bit of a break, doing a little writing and some reading. And this photo of the fields above Dovedale (about 20 miles away) is going into this blog to remind me just how much I enjoy going home.
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Image credit: UGArdener
The iPad and the Book
Interactive publishing
Along with the wheel, the engine and perhaps the bow and arrow, the book has to be one of our greatest inventions. And anyone interested in the future of it should probably take a look at the wonderful video (down at the bottom) that was released on Paid Content earlier on this month.
The video gives us a snapshot of how Penguin envisages its readers (if that’s the right word for them) might interact with books on the iPad.
It’s impressive stuff. You can point, paint, tilt and rattle at various prompted points, with each of these actions causing some different effect or other. It’s something of a mash up between an etch-a-sketch, a coffee table book and a computer – and it’s got quite a few people rather excited.
For me, this looks like an interesting step forward: turning publications into something far more interactive than they have ever been before. But I think it’s important not to muddle the arrival of the iPad up with the fate of the book.
3,000 years on
Reading a book is a solitary pastime, which requires concentration and reflection. All told, it is probably one of the most intellectually rewarding activities we have. To suggest that that might be replaced by the iPad seems, to me, to be a little short sighted. To give an analogy, it would be a little like replacing a gentle lie down on the beach with half an hour on a trampoline.
I saw Professor Iain Stevenson lecture at UCL last week on the future of the book and he said a great many sensible things. He pointed out that books are a durable technology (the original codex has been about for 3,000 years now and has not been replaced by anything more efficient), they are intuitive and attractive.
People can forge deep personal connections with books that I can’t ever imagine that they will do with an iPad. This emotional attachment is intangible but strong. People remember where they bought books and why they bought them. No two books are identical: some are marked; others scuffed, torn, stained or bulging at their bindings after an involuntary swim in the bath tub. (Heaven knows what would happen if the iPad went into the bath).
So, what Penguin demonstrate here is a new type of interactive publishing. I expect we’ll be seeing quite a bit more of it over the next few years.
A little more reading (and listening):
Shelf life: The future of the book – UCL Podcast
The Future of Reading in a Digital World – Clive Thompson in Wired
The Decline and Fall of Books – the Times
Charing Cross: the fading world of books – infographic from the Guardian
How Penguin will Reinvent Books – Paid Content
Digital directions and social media life expectancy
Making sense of it all
I’ve begun 2010 thinking a little about social media shelf life and the longevity of digital publications. Just how long will someone last on a particular social media site before they abandon it? How long could/should/might a blog trundle on?
These, I think, are interesting questions. We’re always told how to set things up on the Internet, but we’re very rarely told when to finish something. When is it time to stop?
When it comes to blogs, it seems, far too many are launched with the assured expectation that they are going to roll gloriously onwards into infinity. Therefore they usually evolve to the same familiar rhythm – which often means beginning in an explosion of energy before generally trailing off into obscurity.
I’ve already blogged here about the enjoyable experience of completing the Camervroom blog. It was a happy experience for a number of reasons: that I was experimenting with new technologies, that I was working from unfamiliar surroundings, and (importantly) that I knew that it was a temporary thing.
Camervroom had a very simple narrative arc. It started with the preparations of the car, continued with launch and the journey and concluded at the finish. There was one wrapping up post from my home in Islington and then that was it. Finished.
To end a blog off in that manner was satisfying. A little like finishing a book and slipping it back into the bookshelf, or sending a completed publication away the printers.
You’re left with a sense of achievement and the knowledge that you can take whatever it is that you’ve learnt on to the next project. The nagging blogger’s noose – the one that tends to appear after you’ve exhausted your first creative spurt – is gone, and because your blog is based over a shorter period of time you can ensure that it conforms to that most important of blogging essentials: that it stays niche.
Ok, jumping from one project to another means that you’ll forgo the benefits of pouring all your efforts (and Googlejuice) into a single domain, but as long as you keep your Twitter feed reasonably well updated then it will be easy to signpost new work and take your readership around the web with you.
This, I suppose, is why I think that Twitter will endure. It is the nerve that runs through all of our online projects, knitting them together and giving them context.
It’s understandable that many established (and very good) bloggers are, through page rank, brand recognition and emotional loyalty, wedded to their domains – but it doesn’t mean for those that are just starting out that it is the only way.
Moving from one carefully crafted web project to another is an underused alternative approach to digital publishing that might well suit those who are looking for a dalliance, and wanting to avoid a millstone.
Something to think about, at least.
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Image Credit: PhotoGraham
SEO What?
Just as the English talk about the weather, everyone in digitaldom talks about SEO. A brief overview of search engine optimisation is included in this presentation along with a number of the most popular viewpoints.
As ever, comments welcome.
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Sources Used:
“Daily Mirror’s Matt Kelly puts SEO in its place” by Robert Andrews [link]
“Google’s secret algorithm revealed” by David Douek [link]
“How SEO is changing journalism” by Shane Richmond [link]
“A journalist’s guide to SEO” by Kevin Gibbons [link]
Posterous, the iPhone and micro journalism: how to live-blog a rally (or something similar)
And the walls fall down
Digital publishing has come a long way. Six years ago (or so) all websites and blogs could only be updated from computers that were connected, with long lengths of cable, to the nearest telephone socket.
But then along came Wi-Fi. Suddenly the Internet was in the air all around us. You could hook up your laptop or, more recently, Smartphone, whenever you got a sniff of it and suddenly all the old boundaries of digital publishing tumbled down.
The mobile Internet meant that people to could publish on the fly from almost anywhere. And when I signed up to the Africa Rally – sometime early on last year – I wanted to do just that.
The Africa Rally
The Africa Rally is best described as a charity touring event, which is organised by a company called the Adventurists. The aim of the rally is to successfully drive from England to Cameroon in Africa in an old, unsuitable or amusing vehicle. I signed up with two old friends and we decided to have a go in an old VW Beetle. Our team name was to be Camervroom.
Blogging it – (problems)
Such a long and peculiar journey immediately struck me as excellent material for a blog. A blog would help us to stay in touch with family and friends at home, it would remain as a record of the trip after we had finished and it would serve as a new publishing challenge – just enough to satisfy my ongoing Internet addiction.
But there were lots of problems. The journey was (at best) going to take a month and to stop each evening and compose a reasoned blog was going to be too time consuming. Even if we did find the time and my two friends did have the patience (which they wouldn’t have had), the likelihood of finding an Internet cafe whenever I wanted one in various corners of Africa was low.
The obvious solution was to cut out Internet cafes and blog via telephone. There are lots of powerful telephones available at the moment and, in particular, the iPhone has about as much publishing clout as an entire newsroom would have had just about a decade ago. You can take photos, shoot video, record audio and send email on the iPhone, all in a few jabs of the finger. In addition it records useful meta-data as you go, including geographic location, local times and date – all of which comes in useful if you want to do some data mashing later on.
Still, taking an iPhone along to Africa is certainly about as stupid as it is clever. On the rally we were passing through 12 different countries, each of which had perhaps two or three different mobile service providers. Any concoction of these may or may not work, depending – or so it seemed – upon a million different capricious factors.
On top of this you have the problem of cost. Everyone has heard horror stories of enthusiastic holiday makers generating enormous telephone bills in just a few short days in Mallorca. Add on to this the fact that an iPhone is just the sort of expensive, desirable object that you shouldn’t carry out of the country, and all things considered it could end up a dysfunctional waste of space.
Blogging it – (solutions)
Enter Posterous
Posterous hasn’t been around that long but it has quickly grown in popularity as one of the best platforms for mobile blogging or, more fashionably put, lifestreaming.
The idea is simple. All you have to do is send emails to Posterous and thereafter it is the software’s job to make sense of the message’s content and cobble it together into a post.
For example if you take a picture on your telephone and then email it to Posterous, within a minute that photo will have been blogged alongside any accompanying text that you include in the body of the email.
Here is a good explanation of how to get the most out of Posterous.
All in all, a blog can be prepared, posted and published within about two or three minutes and you can post to Posterous from wherever you phone allows you to connect to the Internet. A decade ago people wouldn’t have believed it.
Connectivity
So Posterous worked for the blogging software, but what about connectivity? Well, I called O2 who are my mobile service provider and told them that I was going abroad and that I wanted to use my iPhone to connect to the Internet. For £50 a month they set me up with a bolt-on package called Date Abroad 50, which allowed me 50 Mb of data, downloads every month while I was out of the country.
(For a full-scale blog for a month, this isn’t quite enough. But if you are careful (you can monitor how much data you are downloading by studying your telephone settings) and just use the phone to send emails then it should be a good amount to start off with).
Connectivity Again
So. I had a phone with the potential to write emails, record videos and sound and take photos. I had Posterous which had the ability to take all of this information and process the code into a meaningful post and I had a bolt on package from O2 that allowed me to send data while abroad at an affordable price. All done.
Or not.
The iPhone worked perfectly in France and Spain and fitfully in Morocco. After that the cellular network quite predictably fritted in and out continuously. It didn’t work in Senegal, worked a little bit in Mali, failed totally in Burkina Faso and Benin, reappeared dramatically in Nigeria before vanishing again in Cameroon.
In countries without sufficient network coverage I was forced to resort to WiFi. This was a more tricky task, but luckily West Africa has an enormous number of unsecured wireless networks that usually pop up at opportune moments, most of them in hotels, banks or on the streets outside governmental buildings. Three minutes stood outside one of these buildings in Senegal, Burkina Faso, Benin or Cameroon was long enough to post a brief update. And usually that was all that was needed.
Real time rally – some observations
I posted 84 times on the Camervroom blog – most of these coming on the road and in the last month it has been read by around 4,000 unique visitors.
I’ve always thought that a good definition of a successful blog is one that has more total comments than total posts – and Camervroom, with more than 100 different comments, passed this test easily.
There were many benefits of using Posterous – its ease of use and reliability were the main ones, but another little quirk that worked particularly well was its ability to detail the geographic location of a post, making it easy for people to see exactly – to the very spot on a street – where we were.
Lesson learnt
For me, working in digital media, there are a couple of lessons to be learnt here. Firstly, people want to know what is happening in real time: writers, content producers, journalists and whoever else should be willing to occasionally substitute the overall quality of a piece for the amount of time that it takes them to get it out.
This change can be reflected by the frequency of posts, but also in the style and mindset of the writer. An author can write in the present tense instead of the past tense to give a sense of an ongoing journey, they can end a piece without reaching a conclusion or post a picture without an explanation.
All of this flies, of course, in the face of creating a fully coherent journalistic piece, but lifestreaming is something quite different to that. Simply put, you don’t always have to finish with a conclusion because your reader will know that you are going to be back soon.
Secondly, if you are going to have a go at lifestreaming then it is a good idea to experiment with different types of media. By this I mean audio (podcasting), visual (photographs) and video, and the very best applications to use for anyone with an iPhone are Audioboo and You Tube to help you do this.
Thirdly, think about your readership. Posterous is very good at sending out automated updates across a host of different platforms: Twitter, Facebook, You Tube and so on. But does everyone in all of these communities want to know about what you are doing three times a day?
The best bet, until you know otherwise is to manage this yourself manually otherwise over-publishing will be seen as spam and any effort that you are putting into doing something may well have negative consequences.
Micro journalism
I attended Journalism.co.uk’s News Rewired event on Thursday and was interested to hear Greg Hadfield, someone that I hadn’t ever heard of before, say something that I agreed with completely.
He said, journalism is now much more about individual journalists doing little projects than large organisations and enormous projects. And I think that using Posterous for little projects like this is a perfect example of that.
Ok. This was a rally and a holiday, but the same methods that I used on the Africa Rally could easily be used by journalists on projects abroad, by aid workers at the height of a crisis, by managers at a business conference, or by a music journalist on the road with a rock and roll band. You could imagine each of these resulting in excellent pieces of journalism – micro journalism if you like.
Ingredients for a lifecasting blog
- Download Posterous, set up your email to post directly and Google Analytics (optional)
- Get a Smartphone with the ability to connect to the Internet
- If you are going abroad you need to agree a roaming bolt-on with your mobile service provider
- You need a USB cable to connect your telephone to fixed computers when you get the chance (in Africa I took my USB cable everywhere and it acted like a wonderful umbilical cord between this world and the virtual one)
- Make sure you have some good telephone insurance
Cost
All told, in one month Camervroom cost about £150 in additional telephone bills. Just about everything else was free and as it is going to be staying around for as long as the Posterous servers exist (fingers crossed), then I don’t think it is a bad investment at all.
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Links: The Camervroom Blog
Merry Christmas Flickr (The War is Over)
On Tuesday Yoko Ono published a Flickr album with various translations of John Lennon’s famous slogan: ‘War Is Over’.
I immediately liked it. I’ve always been interested in the effect of slogans on popular culture and human psychology (think of the power of Obama’s ‘Yes We Can’) and here was one of the most famous of the twentieth century, republished digitally to coincide with the anniversary of John’s assassination and Christmas.
The only problem was that Yoko – or more likely one of her administrators – had issued each of the images without a creative commons license. Her choice, but the strict license seemed contrary to the spirit of the message and in direct contradiction to her invitation to:
“Print & display in your window, school, workplace, car & elsewhere over the holiday season, and send as postcards to your friends.”
All Rights Reserved – the stiffest of the six creative commons licenses, would have prevented bloggers or website owners from reproducing the image digitally. This, in turn, would have reduced the chances of the images going viral, which I imagine was her intention. The creative commons was, I supposed, just another little quirk of the Internet which needed explaining.
And this is the thing that is wonderful about the Internet:
One email to her Flickr account and an hour later they were all altered.
Easy as that.
So here you go. All 47 images are available with the Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic license. Quite a mouthful, I know. But it basically means that you can put them up on your blog or site and as long as you attribute them with a link, then that’s quite alright.
It’s sharing and crediting – two key characteristics of Web 2.0.
This will be the last blog post for My Digital Notebook in 2009. I’m off on Sunday on the Africa Rally. The first year for this blog has been a quiet one; I’m planning for much more next year. Merry Christmas everyone – (the War Is Over).
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image credit: Yoko Ono Official
Politics and Social Media
I’ve already written about paid search and politics, but a far more obvious digital tool for politicians over the next few months is social media.
It’s an obvious and efficient way of politicians (and budding politicians) engaging with their constituents or target audiences to get their message across. Some good examples being:
Ed Fordham’s website
Alastair Campbell’s Blog
Iain Dale’s Diary
Tom Watson’s Twitter Feed
Watching each of these grind into motion over the last year has been interesting and this week it has been satisfying to get a bit of social-media-political-attention for myself.
Clowns and Parks
I live in Islington, just off Pentonville Road. Opposite my flat is Joseph Grimaldi Park, named after the man who invented the identity for the modern clown and who, Joe Frankenstein contends in a recent book, was the very first celebrity.
For interest, here is a snippet about Grimaldi:
Grim-all-day
A man goes into the doctor’s. ‘Doctor,’ he says, ‘can you help me? Life doesn’t seem worth living, and I am shrouded in constant gloom.’ ‘My good man,’ says the doctor, taking a look at the melancholy face before him, ‘there is only one cure for you. You must go to see Grimaldi the clown.’ ‘Sir,’ replies the patient, ‘I am Grimaldi the clown.’
Depressed or not, Grimaldi was a sensation and two centuries on his bones lie in the park opposite my flat.
All good and interesting until workmen arrived a month ago and dug it upside down.
After weeks of muddied shoes and sharp clatters from beyond the window, I wrote on Twitter:
“Oh. And congratulations to Islington Council for transforming the lovely Joseph Grimaldi Park into something that resembles a bowl of porridge”
It was about as much as I had time to say on the subject. It wasn’t a concern but it was an irritant. The kind of latent issue that a councillor/politician would never get to hear about in a letter or at a public forum, but which they might just find out about if they took the time to study the Internet.
And well done to Bridget Fox for doing just that. Within the hour I received an @tweet informing me about plans for the park and estimated deadlines and this morning it was followed up by a blog post.
If you glue those two things together it adds up to about as much direct engagement I’ve had with a politician for years. Mostly my fault, I know – but a lesson for politicians nonetheless. If you want to dig beneath the surface (pun intended) and engage with the apathetic masses – then social media is a pretty good way to go.
I suppose it would be glib and rather self-absorbed of me to suggest that I was going to vote for a politician because I’ve appeared in one of their blog posts. But in a world of beeping computers, identity numbers and automated messages it is comforting to communicate with another directly. And when it comes down to it, that might just make the difference.
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Image Credit: Rich Lewis
An introduction: Journalism in the Digital Age
Given at City University London on 16.11.09.
As the You Tube videos don’t seem to work, I’ll add this excellent one below:
A list of 22 online tools that (might just) make your job easier
In a bid to save you all time and fuss, here is a list of 22 tools to help you to successfully tinker with the Internet.
Images & Design
The Multicolour Lab. Search for creative commons license photos by colour.
A colour palettes for designers from Colourlovers.
Has your image/photo been copied? Try Tineye.
Use of language
How easy is it to understand your website, or is it full of gobbledygook?
Has your content been copied? Try Copyscape.
SEO
Website Grader. A good, overall SEO analysis of your site.
This site is great for testing website speeds and download times.
To find out who is backlinking into your site? Try this.
Domains
Do you want to find out who owns a domain? Nominet.
123. To check domain availability and to buy your own.
Reverse IP – View all domain names hosted on an IP address from domain tools.
Translating websites
For a quick translation use Google’s translator tool.
For a proper translation, it’s best to stick with the Institute of Translators and Interpreters.
Search
Here’s one of the better Yahoo Pipes.
Google’s News Time Line. Useful as a backwards time-machine, helping you to construct the arc of a story.
For the latest search trend, best try Google Trends.
Downtime
When an Internet site isn’t working, look at this.
Analytics
Crazy Egg. For heatmaps and click data.
Get a quick screenshot on Firefox.
Use this site to decode the latest Twitter hashtag.
Word On Tweet. To find out what the world is talking about.
Odds and ends
Fatfingers is good for misspellings on eBay.
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A long list. I hope some of you find it useful. And yes. I realise that this post is a cliché.
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image credit: Emily Barney.
City University and digital notes
From print to the pixel
I’m giving a talk at City University on ‘Journalism in the Digital Age’ next Monday for Barbara Schofield’s undergraduates.
Here are six articles/resources that I’ve asked the students to read/explore beforehand. They’ve all come from my delicious account, which is now one year old and is starting to be useful.
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1. British Journalism Review. How SEO is Changing Journalism by Shane Richmond. [link]
2. Online Journalism Blog. Basic Principles of Online Journalism: B is for Brevity by Paul Bradshaw. [link]
3. 100 Best Blogs for Journalism Students [link} (lots of good resources)
4. Save the Media Blog. ‘Old Journalism’ standards that shouldn’t die by Gina Chen [link]
5. Clay Shirky’s Blog. Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable by Clay Shirky [link]
6. Peston’s Picks. What future for media and journalism? By Robert Peston [link]
(Updated with some extra suggestions)
7. Reuters: The rise of Social Media and its impact on mainstream journalism [link] (via @priyal)
8. Bitch Buzz. The Future of Journalism: just get on with it by Rebecca Thomson [link] (via @rebeccats)
9. The Guardian: In praise of the subeditor by Kim Fletcher [link] (via @Matt_Parsons)
10. Internet Evolution. The audience still exists if you believe it by Nicole Ferraro [link] (via @Matt_Parsons)
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What would you recommend that I add to this list? What are the best articles on the state/future of journalism that you’ve read this year?
Could you add something below? I’ll put it on the list.
You will be compensated with alcohol, cake or chocolate when I see you.
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image credit: moriza
A brief history of breaking news
The Message and the Messenger
Here are a few different examples of the varying ways in which news has been broken over the past 250 years.
For the most part this is a visual/interactive list. It’s intended to be illustrative rather than exhaustive.
1. 1762: War between Britain and Spain (the news took seven months to reach the Philippines by ship)
“In 1762, when the Seven Years War widened into conflict between Britain and Spain, the enterprising British Admiralty sent a message to British forces in India to set off immediately to attack the Spanish colony in Manila in the Philippines. Arriving seven months after the original message had been sent from London, the British achieved the ultimate surprise attack, since word had still not arrived from Madrid that war had been declared at all. Their ship sailed under the Spanish defenders’ guns unchallenged before launching their successful assault.” –
(From William Hague’s biography of William Pitt the Younger (2004))
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2. February 1830 – The Oddingley Murders. Reports were spread across Britain by newspapers and also street-corner ballads in the month after the story broke.
Here are the first two verses of one:
The greatest of all miracles is going to unfold,
I’m going to unfold
Of two atrocious murder
As true as ever was told.A horrible band of miscreants
A cruel plot did lay
‘Gainst Parker this Church Minister
To take his life away…
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3. 16 April 1912 – Reports of the Titanic’s Sinking (the news took around 30 hours to appear in the newspapers)
Here Stephen Bottomore explains the role that photographic images were beginning to play in breaking news events.
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Since mass-media became a major industry in the late 19th century, whenever there was a major news event, there was an accompanying scramble by journalists for all and any information about it.
When the Titanic went down the scramble became a positive melee, which reports and photographers hunting out any information that they could relate to the ship and its passengers.
This frenzy shook Bert Garai, later one of the great pressmen of the twentieth century who was starting out at the Havas news agency in Paris when the Titanic story broke. ‘It was most impressive and it gave me a glimpse of the speed, efficiency and enthusiasm such work entailed’, he later recalled.
Indeed in the immediate aftermath of the Titanic disaster, the press demonstrated just how quickly and pictorially it could cover a news story pictorially. Within a day or two of the sinking, newspapers and periodicals published artists’ impressions of the disaster, along with numerous photographs of the victims and other aspects of the story.
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4. 1 June 1953 – The conquest of Everest (the news arrived in London one day later)
There is a fascinating story behind James Morris’ (now Jan Morris) scoop for the Times. The news of Hilary and Tenzing’s successful summit attempt was broken by the newspaper, but only after the reporter had foolled other journalists who were trying to intercept his message> He used the following coded communication:
The full story is recounted in the Press Gazette
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5. 22 November 1963 – Assassination of President Kennedy (there was only a slight delay due to overloaded telephone exchanges between Dallas and the other parts of the US)
It is interested to see how these journalists received and delivered news back to their audience in the minutes following Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas. Jammed phones and unreliable testimony hampered their attempts to fish out the facts.
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6. 31 August 1997 – Death of Princess Diana (no delay)
By the time of Princess Diana’s death in 1997, what we have is a smoothed, colourful and evolved version of the JFK video. This and the 11 September attacks might have been the last enormous breaking stories to be covered – almost unopposed – by the traditional media.
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7. 7 July 2005 – The London Bombings (reported by “citizen” journalists on the spot)
July 2005 was a big milestone for bloggers and the Internet. All of a sudden breaking news was being reported differently – by people with personal experience. Accidental journalists.
To look at the role of the Internet in breaking news, there are two very good starting points. Paul Bradshaw and Mindy McAdams.
image credit: alfie
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8. 2 October 2009 – The Rio Olympics
The story was reported within seconds across all broadcast mediums – this is how I received the news via Twitter
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Top image from Flickr
Politics and Paid Search
Nick Griffin and the lost and found
By now Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time has been well dissected.
I’m not going to add much to what has already been said aside from agreeing with the Times, who borrowed a nice descriptive line from P.G. Wodehouse, comparing the BNP leader to Roderick Spode, Bertie Wooster’s nemesis and all-round pantomime villain.
Or, as Wodehouse said:
‘Big chap… with the sort of eye that can open an oyster at sixty paces.’ [link to article]
But from a search perspective, the case is worth examining a little more closely.
Ever since Obama’s beautifully executed digital strategy prised open the doors of the White House, commentators have been speculating about the effect the Internet will have on the next British General Election, which is at the very most only 195 days away.
Some already seem to be suggesting that it will be the Facebook election and swung by social media.
And (interestingly) just this week Charlie Beckett speculated that guerrilla videos might have an impact.
But nobody has said very much about search, especially paid search.
Paid Search and Keywords
For those of you that don’t know, paid search refers to the paid for adverts (referred to as sponsored links) that appear at the top (known as the blue bar) or to the right hand side of the search results.
Paid search rankings are secured by bidding on certain keywords in the Google Adwords Platform. Traditionally they have been most used by advertisers who have used paid search (or ppc/paid per click) to boost their online sales and increase brand awareness.
Political parties should (and will) start to use paid search in the same way very soon.
By ranking at the top of Google’s search results for desired keyword terms, a party, a company or an individual can control their digital footprint far more closely.
Let’s take an example from 22 April this year.
Here you can see that three people are bidding on the keyword term “budget 2009”. The first is direct.gov an information site run by the government who are hoping to increase awareness of their site.
Secondly we have the Conservatives. Budget day is obviously important for them and they have put in place a paid search strategy to direct the maximum amount of traffic to their website.
Thirdly we have some clever marketing by Anne Summers, who drily advise searchers that: ‘There is no recession in pleasure.’ Very nicely done.
It is a useful case study that shows how a political keyword term can be integrated into a paid search campaign.
Throughout the conference season last month, all the major parties missed opportunities in paid search. Off the top of my head, here are some keywords which might have been useful to marketing strategists at Conservative, Labour or Lib Dem HQ:
“gordon brown speech”“labour party conference”
“tory party conference”
None of these were picked up on. For parties that are desperate to get their message out, it must be viewed as an opportunity missed.
Now we come to Nick Griffin. His appearance on Question Time has undoubtedly been one of the political events of the month, and it has been particularly keenly watched online: followed on Twitter and analysed in the blogs.
Here are Google Insights into searches for the keyword term “Nick Griffin” over the last seven days:
And if you click here you can see the rising number of Delicious bookmarks that have been saved under “nickgriffin”.
So last night it was interesting (and thank you to @matthewncube for pointing this out) that Channel 4 had opted to bid on the ‘nick griffin’ keyword. Here is what their advert looked like:
By appearing alone at the top of the Google search results for one of the most popular keyword terms on the Internet, Channel 4 might have doubled or tripled their site traffic.
Along with social and traditional media and SEO, paid search marketing has a role to play in the construction of a truly holistic digital strategy. So far we have seen political parties (or perhaps just the Conservatives) dipping their toes into Adwords, but their attempts so far can only be described as a scattergun approach.
Paid search has the potential to make an enormous difference. Already this year Jason Calacanis has called it the most important industry of the twenty first century. For a quick visual indication of the difference that it can make to a website’s traffic, have a look at what happened to Spiralfrog on Flickr.
It’s possible to carefully study and collect keywords, to manage and monitor huge campaigns that include short and long tail terms as well as other misspellings and oddities. With such campaigns set up, the parties could increase the number of visitors that come to their websites (the centre of any digital hub) and they could also reinforce their message on the search results – over and over and over again.
The question is this: do any of the major parties have the ability to do this in time?
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image credit: the G on Flickr
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Update: Martin Belam has written a post on this subject. It’s good for further perspective.
SEO in the News
This week Derek Powazek wrote a very good post about SEO.
When I say it was very good post, I mean that it was an inspiring post, that it was clever and well-written and right.
He wrote:
“Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned.”
Instead he urged:
“Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again.”
This is an important debate. Millions of pounds are currently being spent by publishers in a never ending quest for immaculate SEO. Companies of all sizes have been blinded by the lights – by the the endless promises of impeachable page ranks and soaring keywords.
But you play the game at a risk. Remember what happened to BMW in 2006?
What do you need to know about SEO?
SEO is a widely complex field, one part logical, one part mysterious. For any ethically-minded publisher, I’d say that looking at these two areas – when coupled with excellent, unique content – should be enough to be going on with for the moment.
Very quickly:
For on page SEO:
Go and read this document. Take your time. Understand it. Implement it.
Off page SEO:
Work out how to maximise the value of your content. Use it wisely. Imagine that you are running your own publishing network.
Submit your blogs to directories publicise them through social media and syndicate your content (written, audio or visual) by licensing it under the creative commons.
Pass it on, ask for a link. Build up your Google juice by merit.
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image credit: Dull Hunk
The Battle of Trafigura
A memorable day for the British media
A good day for the British media. A good day for press freedom. A good day for the Guardian and, especially, its editor, Alan Rusbridger.
Briefly written, here’s what happened.
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I’ve little to add that hasn’t already been mentioned elsewhere, but here’s a thought.
Today we saw old and new media working together. Newspaper editors and journalists were interacting with bloggers and twitterers. There were articles, blogs and tweets – all repeating the same message over and over and over again.
There was an unfamiliar sense of unity. The idea that if the media worked as one it could defend a principle that it felt strongly enough about.
And after years of new and old media growling at each other from different corners of the same room, this was something new.
An important principle has been defended – and that is the most important point of all. But perhaps it is worth noting that some bridges might just have been built in doing so.
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image credit: Ricky David
Social Media Profiles
Digital You
A short post, but a useful one (I hope).
Any digital identity needs consistency and coherence. So whenever we have a new starter at work I always ask them to secure their online profiles across the most important social media sites.
But which ones? Um. These, I reckon:
1. WordPress (importantly)
2. Tumblr (for blogging)
3. Vimeo (for video)
4. Flickr (for images)
5. Delicious (for bookmarking)
6. Twitter (pointless little messages)
7. Audio Boo (for audio recording)
8. Posterous (for blogging)
9. Friend Feed (an aggregator)
10. You Tube (for video)
So there you go. You’ll notice that facebook isn’t on the list, as to my mind it isn’t really too useful for work. I just hope your name isn’t Peter Moore, or I might just have annoyed you.
But have I missed anything obvious?
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image credit: JMC Photos
The new ‘Super’ affiliates
A sign of the times
This is from my colleague and all-round clever Swede, Magnus Nilsson.
A list of the ‘new’ super affiliates:
http://www.guardiandigitalcomparison.co.uk/
And let’s not stop at that. Why not scroll to the bottom of this page:
Yes. That big rolling banner? That’d be a big link to the ES’s affiliate page.
If you have no idea what I’m on about when I use the word affiliate, you might want to read this.
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image credit: adambowie
Net Media Planet in the Tech Track 100
Well done everyone
It is about time that I got around to adding this snippet of news. We’ve just been voted number 16 in the Times’ Tech Track 100 list.
You can read a PDF of the report here.
Above is a picture of my big boss, Sri Sharma, looking like he is about to predict the lottery results.
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Update: Here is a little post on how the image of Sri (above) was created.
Jonathan Agnew, the Observer and a Social Media Scrap
A view from the boundary
This is an interesting tale. I’ll just report the facts of the recent public fall out between Will Buckley of the Observer newspaper, and Jonathan Agnew, the BBC’s cricket correspondent.
Here we go.
Saturday 22 August:
Jonathan Agnew (affectionately known as Aggers) interviews Lilly Allen (the pop star) live on Test Match Special during the lunch break of the final Ashes test at the Oval. (Listen to the audio here)
Sunday 23 August:
An article is published in the Observer by Will Buckley (the Observer’s senior sports writer), describing the interview. The article is called When Aggers met Lily: an unrequited love affair for the middle-aged, and it included the following paragraphs:
“And, finally, it arrived but when it did so, and as is so often the case, Agnew/Allen turned out to be more about the interviewer than the interviewee as Aggers attempted to walk the dangerously thin line between benevolent uncle and desperate middle-aged man panting on the edge of the dance floor. He failed. “You weren’t even born then, oh dear” and “I’d have thought you’d be more of a one-day girl” and “I’m quite getting into your music” and “I’ve been out there and played a bit” and “it’s just destined to be” and “is this what you expected to find up here” and “we might go and see Warney later” – all suggesting that Aggers had positioned himself firmly on the pervy side of things.
“It had all, as with so many putative celebrity couplings, started with a tweet. Aggers was alone in a stand in Edgbaston. He was lost, but he was found. “We keep plugging the Twitter because it’s good fun,” said Aggers, who went on, not to put too fine a point on it, to admit that he has been stalking the young singer ever since the third Test. So it was that he knew Lily had bought a watch which … wait for it … “didn’t fit”. “It looked big,” was the Aggers verdict.”
Monday 24 August:
Jonathan Agnew writers on Twitter:
- I gave Will Buckley 24 hrs to aplogise for calling me a pervert, and he has declined.
- If you feel moved by this his boss is brian.oliver@observer.co.uk well, as you can imagine, I have taken being called a pervert quite badly.
- and you should hear how he described readers of theObserver to me……
- I will tell you how he described his readers (you) if he fails to print a total apology to me and my family on Sunday
- Don’t want him sacked…just an apology
[Five tweets over a 15 minute period, the last at 11:16 PM ]
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Meanwhile, more and more comments are left by readers of the Observer at the bottom of Buckley’s piece. Most of them attacked the writer for a ‘jealous’ and ‘nasty’ attack. You can read a long list of them here.
Tuesday 25 August:
The Observer receive more comments about the article throughout the morning and at around ten o’clock Lilly Allen publishes the following on her Twitter page:
- I rerally [sic] think this Will Buckley guy should apologise to @aggerscricket, he was nothing but kind and gentlemanly to me during our interview
- i dont know 1 person that agrees with The Observer on this one. Maybe this is Buckleys attempt at creating a name for himself as the demise
- of the Observer Monthlys(including Sport) are imminent. Sorry @aggerscricket , i should have left you all alone
[Three tweets over a 10 minute period]
At 2:48 p.m., the Telegraph publish the following article: Lily Allen defends Jonathan Agnew over ‘pervert’ slur
Meanwhile Jonathan Agnew writes on Twitter at around midday:
- “Apparently a statement from Buckley will be appearing soon in the comments under his “article””
At 3:15 pm Will Buckley publishes the following response in the comments’ section:
My, what a commotion. Before the tone becomes even more shrill I would like to apologise to Jonathan and his family for any offence caused by this article. It was intended to be a skit on Aggers and Tuffers and the cult of celebrity but has obviously not been received in this way. The joke missed. As they so often do in the blogosphere.
That said, it should perhaps be pointed out that at no stage did I describe Jonathan as a pervert. I am unlikely ever to be in a position to comment on Aggers’ sexual proclivities and even if I did find myself so placed I wouldn’t dream of doing so. The word I used was ‘pervy’ which to me is a Benny Hill style word rather than one to be taken too seriously.
There is also, it goes without saying, no foundation in my claim that Aggers is jealous of Tuffers. Who could be jealous of Tuffers? This was merely a piece of whimsy based on Jonathan being slightly pompous and huffy when Phil refused to become caught up in the excitement about Lily Allen coming to the TMS box and delivered his wonderful Denis Bergkamp line.
As I have written many times before, TMS is my favourite sports programme and I can’t wait for the team, tweets and all, to be broadcasting from South Africa.
Wednesday 26 August:
More comments followed Buckley’s apology overnight and the following morning Jonathan Agnew writes, once again on Twitter:
- “Just for record, am leaving it to the Obs Sports Ed to decide if that apology is sufficient. But what an eye-opener this has been for all to the power of new media. It is here and will change the way news is responded to, in particular. This showed what twitter can do. Thanks
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It’s an interesting story, with a few unlikely participants.
Firstly, it is interesting that a cricket commentator (see previous post) turned to social media to express his anger rather than a more traditional media channel, and, secondly, it is worth pointing out that Buckley blames all of the ‘commotion’on the blogosphere (curiously he does not think his article has much to do with it) in his apology. He writes:
“The joke missed. As they so often do in the blogosphere.”
This naive – and rather dismissive – sentence betrays Buckley as someone who still hasn’t quite got it. And it also reminds me of a blog post written by Graham Holliday on his Noodlepie blog which is simply titled ‘Wankers’.
Nearly three years ago, he wrote:
“I came across this quote which perfectly sums up the clash of old and new mindsets – I’ve added links to make it a wee bit more understandable.I do get the sense that the Guardian’s columnists are simply not used to this kind of medium, they are not used to getting feedback in public where they can’t just hit ‘delete’ to get rid of a pesky critic.
Suw …. likened such old school thinking to this:
It’s like them walking into a pub, making their pronouncements and then walking out. Later, they are shocked to find out that everyone is calling them a wanker.
Nowt new. I just love the last two sentences. Perfect.”
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image credit: speckled jim
The Ashes – a few digital observations
The Ashes and digital media
So, England have won the Ashes and we have all turned up at work this Monday feeling unduly cheerful. I’ve even had a sensible conversation about cricket with a Spaniard – which underlines the gravity of the situation.
But let’s leave the cricket to one side and have a look at the effect of the series on digital media.
Firstly, as it was not available on terrestrial television people who did not have access to Sky were forced to find alternative ways of following the progress of the team. This meant listening to TMS online, watching the highlights later in the evening on Demand Five or following the live text updates on the BBC.
None of this is new, but the lack of straight TV coverage made people look around for alternatives. And when they found good places to watch/rewatch or listen to the action online, they would have also found more photos of the action, additional interviews, podcasts, blogs, videos, chat rooms and viewers’ polls. [See here or here]
Secondly, the series – which was played in stints of various days over the course of a month and a bit – encouraged social interaction online. People sent in their observations, their anxieties and their jokes, and they shared their photos and blogs while following the players and commentators on Twitter.
And one of the more surprising adoptions of Twitter came from members of the TMS team – a group of quite wonderful eccentrics that few would expect to understand any technology that had been introduced since around 1933. Here are some of their accounts:
And from Sky:
Not doing badly are they? – And it refutes one of the eight commonly used excuses for not using the web (“I leave social media to a younger generation. I’m too old.”)
The series also seems to have had a good effect on the BBC, and if you have a look at this round up of the Ashes series, you will see how they are beginning to share their Googlejuice by linking out to a range of external sites (mostly they are newspaper run websties).
This has not always happened, and if you believe in Jeff Jarvis’ link economy then this is a significant step forward. I wonder if they will soon start linking to blogs in the same way?
The Ashes is the kind of series that can change people’s habits. The nature of the sport is that you have to return to it, again and again, week after week – making it the perfect catalyst for altering behavioural patterns, and much more effective that a one-off football or boxing match.
I’ll finish this off with an excerpt from an email that I have just received from my Australian boss.
“Due to Australia’s unfortunate loss in The Ashes, I will be leaving the country on Wednesday evening and returning back to work on the 16th of September when hopefully everything has calmed down.”
I don’t feel sorry for him a bit.
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Update. Robin Goad, the Research Director for Hitwise UK has shown how much the Ashes have boosted the BBC and Sky Sports cricket websites.
image credit: fat mandy
Summertime blogging, anyone?
image credit: dbdbrobot
I’m looking for someone to work in our content department for the next month or so. You’ll be writing blogs, web pages, news and feature articles and anything else related to online content production.
Net Media Planet is the fourth biggest search company in the UK. We work with Dell, McAfee, Disney, O2, Symantec and Singapore Airline. We are based on Great Titchfield Street, which runs between Oxford Circus and Regent’s Park.
It’s paid work and will be a brilliant introduction to digital publishing. You will be expected to listen to quite a bit of David Bowie.
Interested? Get in touch:
Peter [at] netmediaplanet [dot] com