Online Journalism Blog

Telegraph.co.uk gets an amazing 8% of its visitors from social sites like Digg, Delicious, Reddit and Stumbleupon, Julian Sambles, Head of Audience Development, has revealed.

The figure explains how the Telegraph is now the most popular UK newspaper site.

75,000 visitors a day

The Telegraph had about 28 million unique visitors in March, which means social sites are sending it almost 75,000 unique visitors a day.

Search engines are responsible for about a third of the Telegraph’s traffic Julian also revealed - or about 300,000 unique visitors a day.

This means the Telegraph gets 1 social visitor for every 4 search ones - an astonishingly high ratio.

You can read more of what Julian said about the Telegraph’s social media strategy here. The statistics were originally given for an article on social sites on FUMSI.

The previous two posts on the role of local authorities in regional news sparked a bit of crowdsourcing on Twitter: “Do you think your council newspaper is worth having?” I asked. The responses, tagged #councilpapers, can be seen at this Twitter search. Below you will find a Wordle cloud of tagged tweetsand a Twickie compilation of the first dozen or so responses.

In addition, Adrian Short suggested people bookmark council papers on Delicious with the tag ‘councilpapers’ - you can see these here. If yours isn’t listed, please add it. [Read more]

To mark 1000 posts on this blog, I thought I’d reflect on what I’ve learned since post #1.

UPDATE: Now available in German, Spanish, Hebrew, and Portuguese.

UPDATE 2: I’ll be posting further ‘1000 things’ via Twitter - you can find them with this search or this RSS feed. [Read more]

Quietly, while millions have been spent on the recent relaunch, someone at The Guardian has been savvy enough to do some things the simple - and cheap - way.

Take a look in the outside column of the Lost In Showbiz blog, and you’ll see ‘Our faves’ - a feed from the journalists’ del.icio.us account. You will find something similar in Jemima Kiss’s PDA ‘Newsbucket‘ and on other blogs like Deadline USA. [Read more]

I’ve said for a long time that news organisations need to have a distribution strategy for the web as much as they have one for offline. Well now the Daily Mail’s rise to the top of the ABCe charts is causing some to ask whether they have just such a strategy, albeit a rather clumsy one. Andy at Canofpop.com goes as far as to suggest:

“I reckon some of their global traffic is down in part to the spamming of popular social news portals. [Read more]

This was originally published in Press Gazette as Del.icio.us social bookmarking explained and Need some background info? Just follow the electronic trail.

How journalists can use web bookmarking services to manage, find and publish documents.

Every newspaper has a library, and most journalists have kept some sort of cuttings file for reference. But what if you could search that cuttings file like you search Google? What if you could find similar articles and documents? What if you could let your readers see your raw material?

That’s what online bookmarking - or ‘social bookmarking‘ - tools allow you to do. And they have enormous potential for journalists.

There are a number of social bookmarking services. Del.icio.us is best known and most widely used and supported. For this reason this article will focus mostly on Del.icio.us. [Read more]

Over at Press Gazette you’ll find my latest article on using social bookmarking for journalism - split into three areas: managing cuttings; sourcing information; and publishing. Let me know if you have any personal experiences with bookmarking services - are there better services than Delicious?

Sometimes I feel like my vision of the future is slowly coming true in front of my eyes. Yesterday I discovered that the Birmingham Post features writer Jo Ind has started incorporating Del.icio.us social bookmarks into her articles. If you look at the bottom of this health article you’ll see the following line:

“To learn more about Select Research and the body volume index, see Jo Ind’s suggested links or visit her blog.”

Jo Ind’s suggested links are on Del.icio.us The tool is also being used by Radio 4’s iPM, as previously reported and Jemima Kiss integrates her feed into her Guardian blog as the PDA ‘Newsbucket’ (much as this blog and many others do as an albeit more prosaic “delicious feed”).

But phrasing the link as ’suggested links’ (rather than ‘iPM Delicious’) and positioning it at the bottom of an article rather than as a sidebar widget is a better idea, and closer to what I was suggesting in the ‘What’ of my ‘Five Ws and a H that should come after every story’.

I’m currently preparing an article on social bookmarking for journalists. Does anyone know of any other examples of it being used in public by journalists?

Oh, and by the way: to learn more about delicious and social bookmarking, see my suggested links here and here.

The Guardian has brought its typical idiosyncratic approach to social bookmarking with the launch of ‘Clippings’. But for once I think they’ve missed the mark.

By clicking on the scissors icon () next to a story users can now ‘clip’ an article to their own account. They could do this before anyway - but importantly, the revamped service means they can see others’ saved stories and subscribe to a feed, or publish their own feed elsewhere.

These are welcome additions to an older service, but there are some glaring oversights. [Read more]

Over at BBC Radio 4’s iPM website there’s an interesting experiment going on - and some good examples of my 21st century newsroom ideas in practice.

1. Firstly, their ‘Rough Notes’ blog is a good example of the ‘draft’ stage of my News Diamond, with members of the team talking about what they’re working on (and comments facility for people to suggest stories - some very good ideas there, BTW). Also, posts labelled ‘In Production‘ allow you to see the work so far, while you can comment on the current running orders.
2. Secondly, they have a Flickr page where users can upload images. Distributed Journalism, perhaps? Well, more like simple community.
3. Thirdly, and perhaps best of all, they’ve made their del.ico.us account public, so readers can see what they’re reading. That’ll be the ‘What’ of my Five Ws and a H, then.

The blurb, BTW, is: “We’ll source what we do through the best blogs, passionate ‘ear catching’ online debate as well as comments and recommendations of others. So what ends up on air will be shaped by listeners and bloggers.”