As part of an ongoing series, Deborah Bonello talks about a career that has taken her from business journalism in London to video journalism in South America, and a current role producing video at the FT.

What education and professional experience led to your current job?

After I graduated from Bristol University in 1998 (I wrote for my student newspaper Epigram for most of my time there), I moved up to London and started working for Newsline, an online news service run as part of the media database product Mediatel.

A year later I was taken on by New Media Age as a reporter, where I got to watch the dot com boom become the dot com crash and work with the then-editor, Mike Butcher, now the editor of TechCrunch Europe.

From there I moved to Campaign to edit their Campaign-i section, and when that got cut because of budgets after a year I spent the next few years freelancing on media business magazines (Campaign, Media Week, NMA, FT Creative Business) and watching how the traditional publishing industry took on the internet.

By then, I was fed up of London and business journalism, so I headed off to Latin America. After a year in Argentina as a print only journo, I moved to Mexico to launch NewCorrespondent.com, an experiment in digital journalism, with help from Mike Butcher.

The idea was to use free online tools – YouTube, WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, BlipTv and more – to publish multimedia journalistic content. NewCorrespondent.com became MexicoReporter.com and three months became three years. After my first six months of running the site in Mexico, I got taken on by the Mexico bureau of the Los Angeles Times, started shooting video and got trained in it by some of the best in the business (Scott Anger and Tim French). I contributed daily written and video dispatches to their Latin America blog, La Plaza, as well as latimes.com and the newspaper.

MexicoReporter.com became a go-to for English-speakers living in Mexico, as well as people around the world, and it was through the site that I also got commissioned to produce video pieces for the Guardian and Al Jazeera, amongst others, as well as for radio comment on breaking news such as the swine flu epidemic, violence against journalists and escalating drug-related violence in the country. The video caught the attention of the FT, and as the Los Angeles Times took their foot of the video pedal, it seemed like a good moment to move. I am currently working as a video producer and journalist in the FT’s London office.

What does your job involve?

I film, produce and edit video news, features and interviews for the Financial Times website, sometimes working as a one-man-band shooting operation, sometimes working with in-house camera operators and our correspondents around the UK and abroad.

Where do you see your career/job developing in future?

That all depends on how video journalism develops, but I am very excited about the potential of online journalism and video. TV and video are converging, which means new program formats and genres are emerging all the time, and everyone is experimenting with different styles of telling stories in video and multimedia.

I am especially interested in how the costs of technology have come down so dramatically that we should see a new generation of visual and text storytellers base themselves abroad at a fraction of the cost, tapping into the need for reduced costs in foreign reporting that the traditional media so desperately needs to survive to keep that content strand going.

Right now, if you’re a journalist that isn’t using new technologies to tell stories, you’re edging yourself out of the job market. Rather than the end of journalism as we know it, I think multimedia signifies a brave new world where our old disciplines still count but can manifest themselves across so many different platforms and media that your work is as creative and innovative as you want it to be. We just have to make sure we keep our eyes on the journalistic disciplines, and use technology as a means to an end rather than just for the sake of it.

In the long-term, I see myself based out in the Spanish-speaking world as a multimedia foreign correspondent.

National UK newspapers had 1,665,202 followers of their Twitter accounts at the start of October – an increase of 193,266 on September 1st (when they had 1,471,936).

The rate of growth has slowed, however. This is a monthly increase of 13.1%, compared with 17% from August 1 to September 1, and also from July 1 to August 1.

What’s more, 151,555 of the increase (or 78% of the total) is down to just one account – that of @guardiantech (which owes its popularity to its place on the Twitter Suggested User List). Indeed, of the 131 accounts I’m tracking, 51 have fewer followers than me (@malcolmcoles)!

You can see the full table here, or below (although the iframe isn’t behaving properly, so you’re better off clicking here).

National UK newspapers had 1,471,936 Twitter followers at the start of September – up 213,892 or 17% on August 1 (when they had 1,258,044 followers).

You can see the September figures (orignally posted here) below or here.

I have more Twitter statistics here.

The Guardian has more URLs bookmarked on Delicious than any other UK newspaper, as I first revealed here (with the original video here)

There are 10,914 Guardian URLs bookmarked, with the Times coming 2nd (3,944) and the Independent in 3rd place (3,196).

Quarkbase must be using the Delicious API but it doesn’t say where it gets the number. Click the papers’ name to see the Quarkbase figures (and more).

Visitors to UK newspaper sites look at an average of 2.5 pages a day, according to data from Alexa. But 62.8% of users look at just one page (figures originally posted here).

In terms of daily page views per user, the Sun (4 pages), Guardian (3.1) and Telegraph (2.9) are above average. Visitors to the Mail site look at just 2.4 pages a day – so while the Mail may have come top in the July ABCe figures, maybe its large number of overseas visitors aren’t staying to look round the site.

Stickiness of UK newspaper sites

• Better than average figures are in bold.
• The bounce rate is the percentage of visits that consisted of just one page (so a low number is good).
• These figures are 3-month averages. These change on a daily basis at Alexa – so they may have altered slightly by the time you check. Click the papers’ names to see the current data.
• The overall average at the bottom is a simple average – it has not been weighted by traffic.

Page views vs bounce rate

The table is ranked by daily page views per user. The bounce rate is another measure of stickiness. It doesn’t exactly correlate with page views, as papers may have differing proportions of loyal, engaged users who visit lots of pages. The more pages that these users visit, the better the page view figure – but they won’t affect the bounce rate.

The Telegraph has a worse bounce rate than the sites near it in the table, perhaps because the great success with its Digg tool doesn’t always lead to multi-page visits?

Using Alexa data

There are issues with using Alexa data like this as it underrepresents UK users, who may have differing usage patterns to other visitors. However, as it seems to underrepresent them more or less equally, the rankings should be OK even if the absolute figures are all out by the same margin.

Following Malcolm Coles’ piece on how the Guardian, Times and FT are winning on Twitter, Sothisischristmas graphed the results:

Other people have tweeted (or retweeted) the Guardian’s URLs 328,288 times over the last 4 months – way more than any other UK newspaper, according to my full analysis here.

The FT and Times have more followers on Twitter than the Telegraph and Mail – but they’re not tweeted about as often. The Telegraph is in second place: 120,731 tweets by other people (ie excluding the Telegraph’s own accounts) have included a link to one if its URLs. The Daily Mail is 3rd with 95,851.

How many times each newspaper has had a URL tweeted by someone else

• Guardian: 328,288
• Telegraph: 120,731
• Daily Mail: 95,851
• The Sun: 33,580
• Independent: 24,423
• Times Online: 23,329
• Mirror: 13,881
• Express: 2,818
• FT.com: 691

About the data

The figures show that the Guardian has successfully translated its massive follower advantage into other people tweeting about its URLs. There are some caveats about the data (especially about the Times and FT figures), which you can read on the original version of this post (there are some other Twitter statistics about newspapers etc on my blog too).

National newspapers have a total of 1,068,898 followers across their 120 official Twitter accounts – with the Guardian, Times and FT the only three papers in the top 10. That’s according to a massive count of newspaper’s twitter accounts I’ve done (there’s a table of all 120 at that link).

The Guardian’s the clear winner, as its place on the Twitter Suggested User List means that its @GuardianTech account has 831,935 followers – 78% of the total …

@GuardianNews is 2nd with 25,992 followers, @TimesFashion is 3rd with 24,762 and @FinancialTimes 4th with 19,923.

Screenshot of the data

Other findings

• Glorified RSS Out of 120 accounts, just 16 do something other than running as a glorified RSS feed. The other 114 do no retweeting, no replying to other tweets etc (you can see which are which on the full table).
• No following. These newspaper accounts don’t do much following. Leaving GuardianTech out of it, there are 236,963 followers, but they follow just 59,797. They’re mostly pumping RSS feeds straight to Twitter, and  see no reason to engage with the community.
• Rapid drop-off There are only 6 Twitter accounts with more than 10,000 followers. I suspect many of these accounts are invisible to most people as the newspapers aren’t engaging much – no RTing of other people’s tweets means those other people don’t have an obvious way to realise the newspaper accounts exist.
• Sun and Mirror are laggards The Sun and Mirror have work to do – they don’t seem to have much talent at this so far and have few accounts with any followers. The Mail only seems to have one account but it is the 20th largest in terms of followers.

The full spreadsheet of data is here (and I’ll keep it up to date with any accounts the papers forgot to mention on their own sites)… It’s based on official Twitter accounts – not individual journalists’. I’ve rounded up some other Twitter statistics if you’re interested.

Some news sites get a last updated time stamp in Google – and some don’t. It’s a bit of information next to the URL that says XX minutes ago and shows when the most recent story was published.

Not all news sites get it – although I can’t see any rhyme or reason (originally posted here).

Sites that do have it

The sites that do have it are: Times, Telegraph, BBC News, Express, ITN, Guardian. (Click the picture for a bigger version).

News sites with a time stamp

The Express could probably live without it, as I recently showed that they don’t update their site after 8am on a Sunday.

Sites that don’t have it

The sites that don’t seem to have it are: FT, Sun, Mirror, Manchester Evening News, Dail Mail, Metro and Independent.

News sites with no time stamp

Most newspaper websites are doing a bad design job in making their stories readable. Too many are using:

• small fonts,
• long off-putting paragraphs,
• no subheadings,
• no in-content boxes or pictures, and
• no in-content links.

To explain more, I’ve written a companion post on online readability (design, not writing – and this post was first published here). And here’s an example each of their news stories so you can see the issue: Daily Mail, Express, FT, Guardian, Independent, Mirror, Sun, Telegraph, Times.

Main readability design mistakes

This table summarises the main ways they are going wrong.

Tiny fonts

They are all using font sizes that are too small for comfortable reading on copy-heavy pages. Only the Guardian, Independent, Mirror and Telegraph offer obvious controls for resizing text.

But most of the sites use 12 or 13px fonts for body copy. I think this is too small to be the default – 16px is a much more readable size. Only the Guardian comes anywhere near this.

No sub-headings

Astonishingly, not a single major newspaper site uses sub headings in its news stories, (apart from the Sun occasionally) despite this having been a generally accepted web readability recommendation since 1997 when it comes to helping people read webpages.

Long paragraphs

Nearly half use long paragraphs, serving up great slabs of unappealing copy. This makes the pages hard to scan and read – again, despite using shorter paragraphs online being a standard online guideline.

Bad readability

These three are vying for last place when it comes to readability. I can’t believe anyone could comfortably read these pages for long:

• Express – A small font, expressed in absolute pixels, so Internet Explorer users can’t even make it bigger. And the Express full-justifies its copy, making it harder to read as the gaps between words are different on each line. A complete pig’s ear.
• Independent – A small font combined with multi-sentence paragraphs. A readability nightmare, even if there is a text-resize control.
• Daily Mail – The Mail does a good job of breaking up its pages with pictures. But its font size is too small, and there are no subheadings in the copy to help the user understand what the story is about or give the eye a rest.

Fairly poor readability

• Mirror – There’s a font size control (although this is a poor second to having a big enough font in the first place). And although it’s only 12px, the Mirror is at least using Verdana which is easier to read than Arial at small sizes. This, plus its use of short paragraphs, rescued it from the ‘bad’ list.
• Telegraph – Default font size is too small (smaller than that of the Times and FT), although there is a control to make it bigger. It uses short paragraphs, but for me it’s all still too hard to read.
• Times – A slightly bigger font than the Telegraph, but no text size control, and paragraphs are too long. Someone introduce the CMS people to the return key …
• FT – The font is starting to get big enough. But while it’s paragraphs tend to be only one or two sentences, the sentences themselves tend to be long. You’d still have to really want to read a story to plough to the end of it.
• Guardian – Its font size is almost big enough for my liking, and I nearly put it in the ‘getting there’ list. But its paragraphs are too long, and there are no in-content devices (boxes etc) to break up the copy.

Getting there

• Sun – A nice big font, short paragraphs, copy broken up with images, and occasional sub-headings. Probably the best of them – some more sub-headings would really help though, and I’m not convinced by the Georgia font or the occasional use of italics.

Newspaper website readability: table notes

Verdana and Arial are the same height at a given size, but Verdana is wider. At small font sizes, Verdana will be easier to read as it will look bigger. At bigger font sizes, it appears to stretched.

The Sun is using Georgia, so its font sizes can’t be directly compared to the others – at a given size, Georgia looks smaller than Arial and Verdana.

The Sun is also using SIFR to replace standard web fonts with a custom one in its headlines.

The Guardian is the only site to use in-copy links. These are a good idea to help people read a page, as they draw the eye and encourage people to keep reading. However, the Guardian has an annoying habit of linking keywords to its own pages when you might think they are external links.

The Independent treats its own stories (standfirst, long paragraphs) differently to agency-sourced ones (no standfirst, short paragraphs). The table shows information for its own stories.

Headings explained

These findings are all for the news pages. Other sections may be treated differently.

• Headline size -Default font size (in pixels) for the main headline.
• Font size -Default font size in pixels for the body copy. The Express is set to an absolute size of 12px. The rest are in EMs, and I’ve assumed a 16px starting font.
• Body font -The first font listed in the CSS.
• Standfirst – Is there any summary or introduction to the news stories (EG a bold first paragraphs, or a more traditional standfirst)?
• Sub headings – Whether the copy is broken up with sub-headings.
• Short paragraphs -Are paragraphs kept short – 1 or 2 sentences, maximum. Or are there huge sections of copy that have probably been lifted verbatim from print?
• In-content boxes -Is there any attempt to break up the web copy with boxes (Eg ones with ‘More …’ stories).
• In-copy links – Are links routinely used in the copy?
• Obvious text size control – Is there an obvious way to control the text size (I know you can use the browser to do this, and you probably know it too – but my mum doesn’t. And I bet most people don’t).

Thanks to the excellent Firebug with deciphering the style sheets.