Tag Archives: Birmingham Post

A simple hyperlocal experiment which shows how publishers can engage with different audiences

Civic engagement? Most readers spent more than 30 minutes on the liveblog

On Monday I was involved in a fascinating experiment in civic engagement: 10 hyperlocal blogs all agreed to embed a liveblog of a hustings which would give inhabitants of the largest local authority in Europe an insight into the next council leader.

The liveblog itself was to be maintained by student contributors to the Birmingham Eastside news site. The decision to offer it out to hyperlocal sites across the city seemed obvious – so why aren’t publishers doing this regularly? Continue reading →

The regional press on Twitter: interview with Johnston Press’s Mark Woodward

3 Replies

In a previous post, we saw that some regional newspapers do a lot better than others in terms of their Twitter click-through rate. Johnston Press titles, The Northampton Chronicle and Echo, The Scotsman and The Lancashire Evening Post tended to perform the best out of the 10 newspapers that we looked at in this regard.

The Online Journalism Blog talked to Mark Woodward, head of websites at Johnston Press, about the findings and about how Johnston Press sees Twitter as a whole.

Image: Johnston Press

How Johnston Press adapted to Twitter

The need to adapt to the evolving digital landscape is very important for regional newspapers as they attempt to reduce the well documented decline in readership.

A large part of this adaptation is concerned with the growth of social media and the ways that this can be used to drive traffic to a news site.

Out of all the papers analysed in the original post, the Johnston Press titles seemed to be doing this best.

Continue reading →

Newspapers on Twitter: who has the most click-throughs – and why?

7 Replies

Regional newspapers on Twitter – percentage of followers retweeting – click for interactive version

Newspaper Twitter accounts with the highest click-through rates tend to follow more people, customise tweets for Twitter and engage in more conversation, according to an analysis by Patrick Scott in the first of a series of three posts.

The number of followers a Twitter account has is often assumed to be representative of the influence they command. But is it what we should be measuring? Continue reading →

Why it pays to respond to your comments

2 Replies

This story was originally published at Poynter. Republished here for archiving purposes.

http://www.birminghampost.net/news/politics-news/2009/08/04/cost-of-new-birmingham-city-council-website-spirals-to-2-8m-65233-24307674/

Newspapers take a lot of flak when they or mis-attribute or fail to acknowledge the work of bloggers and members of the public in reporting a story, so it was refreshing to see my two local newspapers quickly respond to amend online reports following a number of corrective comments. But more interesting was to see how they reaped the benefits of that responsiveness. Continue reading →

Crowdsourcing platform Help Me Investigate is live – and generates its first story

15 Replies

View Birmingham’s parking ticket hotspots in a larger map

Today the Birmingham Post publishes the first story to come out of the crowdsourcing platform I’ve been creating – Help Me Investigate. It’s about parking ticket hotspots in Birmingham*. UPDATE: The Birmingham Mail have also published a report, from which the map above comes.

The site has only been public for a couple of weeks, and we have refrained from any launch or publicity, preferring to let it grow organically in these early stages.

But the early results have been extremely encouraging.

Although the parking ticket story is the first to appear in traditional media, it is not the first investigation to be completed on the site. One investigation was completed during the testing stage; another shortly after. Both had resolutions that might not have made traditional media, but were important to the users and, for me, resulted in the sort of engagement you want from media (more on that below). Continue reading →

Social bookmarking for journalists

4 Replies

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. Continue reading →

How journalists can master Twitter (blogger’s cut)

50 Replies

The following is a longer version of the article that appeared in Journalism.co.uk last week, with some extra tools and quotes.

It’s almost impossible to sum up Twitter in one line. To some, it is a way of delivering content to mobiles as headline text alerts. To others, it’s a social networking tool for getting contacts and leads. Some use it as a research tool for developing stories; and still others as a project management tool to gather a number of contributors together – for example, drivers posting updates on traffic.

In other words, it is what you make it and the only way to figure it out is to start using it. The following is a guide to getting started on Twitter as a journalist, and some of the things that can be done with it. Continue reading →

Social bookmarking the Birmingham Post way

8 Replies

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.

How interactive are UK business news websites?

8 Replies

That’s the question Birmingham Post reporter Joanna Geary has been asking herself, and has come up with the following rather lovely graphic:

Clickon the image for a larger, more readable version – you’ll see she’s looking for availability of email contacts, use of things like maps, blogs, bookmarking, video (is that interactive? Or multimedia?), email newsletters, mobile alerts, RSS, podcasts, chats, forums – and Twitter: “I know it’s not yet a mass communication device but I think it’s a good indicator of those who are thinking about the development of the market” Continue reading →