Last weekend I attended the first WordCamp UK – a conference for WordPress-using bloggers, developers and designers. Aside from the tips on plugins, backups and content management systems, one line stood out for me “If you’re a web developer get to know a journalist. We need them. And they’re cheap.” Continue reading
UPDATE (Aug 7 ’08): The Annual Survey of Journalism & Mass Communication Graduates suggests employment opportunities and salaries are not affected.
J-schools are generally set up to prepare students for the mainstream news industry: print and broadcasting, with a growing focus on those industries’ online arms. There’s just one small problem. That industry isn’t exactly splashing out on job ads at the moment…
The LA Times is cutting 150 editorial jobs and reducing pages by 15%; The Atlanta Journal-Constitution cutting nearly 200 jobs; the Wall Street Journal cutting 50 jobs; Thomson Reuters axing 140 jobs; in the UK Newsquest is outsourcing prepress work to India, while also cutting jobs in York and Brighton; Reed Business Information, Trinity Mirror and IPC are all putting a freeze on recruitment, with Trinity Mirror also cancelling its graduate training scheme and cutting subbing jobs. In the past two months almost 4,000 jobs have vanished at US newspapers (Mark Potts has this breakdown of June’s 1000 US redundancies). In the past ten years the number of journalists in the US is said to have gone down by 25%.
Given these depressing stats I’ve been conducting a form of open ‘panel discussion’ format via Seesmic with a number of journalists and academics, asking whether journalism schools ought to revisit their assumptions about graduate destinations – and therefore what they teach. The main thread is below.
The responses are worth browsing through. Here’s my attempt at a digest: Continue reading
If you want to pick my brains on using various online tools to track breaking news and pursue stories, I’m going to be teaching a one day course on the topic next month. You can find more details and booking here.
This may be something I do more of, so if there are any areas you’d like to see me do a training course/open session on, let me know in the comments below.
I recently invited Rick Davies, external monitor for the Guardian’s Katine project, to provide his insight into how much crowdsourcing has actually taken place – and what issues have arisen around that. This is his response:
In October 2007 Paul wrote an enthusiastic post about the Guardian’s involvement in what could be seen as a crowdsourcing experiment with AMREF, an African NGO working in Katine sub-country in Uganda, and supported by the Guardian. In that post Paul quoted Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger:
“We’ll need money obviously. But, just as importantly we need advice and involvement. Among our readers are water engineers, doctors, solar energy experts, businessmen and women, teachers, nurses, farmers. We absolutely don’t need a stampede of volunteers, but we would like a technical know-how bank of people who are prepared to offer time and advice. We’ll let you know how to get involved as we go.” Continue reading
The New York Times and LinkedIn have entered into a partnership that will see LinkedIn users “shown personalized news targeting their industry verticals … and will then be prompted to share those stories will professional associates.” Meanwhile, NYT readers will see a widget directing them to LinkedIn (see image below). Continue reading
I’ve been increasingly using Seesmic as a ‘pre-blogging’ tool. What does that mean? It means that I invite comments on a question before the blog post is even written. It means I do some of my research in public. It means that, in talking through an issue with my peers, I clarify what it is we’re really talking about in the first place. Continue reading
Second talk: Search Engine Optimisation, here’s the headlines:
Code your website so content is first thing search engines see after meta tags, but not users (e.g. floating divs)
Big corps will steer clear of WordPress due to security concerns.
Get Google webmaster console
Google is all about data acquisition – the more they know about you, the more they can do with you. Never use Google Analytics for commercial data.
If you are getting over 60% of visits from search engines it’s not healthy – you should be getting referrals and directs.
Think about international SEO, which is “soft”, apparently
Get into forums, but ignore directories
“If you’re a web developer, get to know writers”: “journalists are cheap”. They “never ask for enough money” A lot of link builders are journalism students
Google algorithm has around 400 variables; we only know around 200. But Google’s black box is us and what we users do.
Useful links
SEO for wordpress
www.seomoz.com
Google Ranking factors
SEOdigger.com
Google webmaster central blog
Google keyword finder
www.sepguy.com
Notes from today’s conference:
If you’re using Akismet on a commercial site (or are making over $500 per month) you should be paying for a commercial licence. See Akismet.com.
Bad Behaviour plugin also recommended as a pre-Akismet filter to save bandwidth if you get a lot of spam.
If meta tag description is same on all pages (default), Google seems to think they’re all ‘similar pages’ and omits from initial results.
WordPress creates a lot of duplicate content which Google doesn’t like. AllInOne SEO plugin allows you to noindex archives to prevent that.
BackUpWordpress plugin – I should really have backup habits. WPDmanager recommended by some, which includes scheduled backups. The biggest it’s worked for in this room is only 500 posts. I’d need to test on mine (1000 posts). Some web hosts allow you to schedule database backups too.
MaxBlogPress ping optimiser plugin prevents you being classed a ping spammer but asks for email address and sends you junk
cForms plugin allows you to set up more accessible verification processes rather than captcha. Also allows you to set up form with upload functionality.
RoleManager also recommended. Can also deinstall and the customisations remain.
It being a blogging conference and all, I’m sure there’ll be more than enough coverage of this weekend’s WordCamp UK in Birmingham. However, if you’re following it I’ll still be twittering my impressions and thoughts (most likely via Twitterfone) at twitter.com/paulbradshaw
Online Journalism Blog 
