Trinity Mirror have launched a ‘wiki for the North East’ as a result of an internal contest to bring out innovative ideas. Web developer Louise Midgley, from North-East division ncjmedia, received a cash prize and will receive future share of any profits from her idea: wikinortheast.co.uk “an online archive covering all aspects of the North-East region”. Continue reading
The Midlands News Association is the latest publisher to embrace the mobile web with mobile-friendly sites for the Express & Star and Shropshire Star. The sites were built by the Midland News Association’s online arm MNA Digital with mobile technology partner Wapple, based in Bromsgrove. Particularly impressive is how easy it is for users to make comments – normally one of the most difficult acts when viewing on a mobile.
The move comes barely a week after The Telegraph also (re)launched its mobile version, while Trinity Mirror has announced its plans to take 14 of its newspapers mobile in the next few months.
Mobile Computer has a good overview of the various national mobile services,
PaidContent has a summary of Trinity’s half-year reports with some silver lining accompanying the now familiar announcements of increasingly declining print ad revenue:
“Digital revenue is up a whopping 100.6 percent during the period to £2.8 million (UK titles up 145.4 percent, Scottish up 34.8 percent).” Continue reading
Here’s the good news for mobile phone websites: Vodafone has “seen a 50% rise in revenues from its data services over the past quarter, after the number of its customers using the web from mobile devices more than doubled.” 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
Newsquest has begun the roll out of a relaunch of its websites with the Lancashire Telegraph, Bradford Telegraph & Argus and York’s The Press.
Hold The Front Page describe it as a “modernised and revamped look”. Really? As Keri Davies put it: “ugh, what a mess”. Alex Lockwood: “looks like shoveldesign – can barely see the ‘Lancashire’ on the logo; national news more imp. than local comment?” John Thompson: “Too much noise and everything in three columns. Lead stories should run across two colums Text too small in places.” Continue reading
Virtual intern Natalie Chillington rounds up last week’s online journalism-related news
WordPress
A few weeks ago I wrote an 800-word piece for UK Press Gazette on how journalism has changed in the past decade. My original draft was almost 1200 words – here then is the original ‘Blogger’s Cut’ for your delectation…
The past decade has seen more change in the craft of journalism than perhaps any other. Some of the changes have erupted into the mainstream; others have nibbled at the edges. Paul Bradshaw counts the ways…
Perhaps the biggest and most widely publicised change in journalism has been the increasing involvement of – and expectation of involvement by – the readers/audience. Yes, readers had always written letters, and occasionally phoned in tips, but the last ten years have seen the relationship between publisher and reader turn into something else entirely.
You could say it started with the accessibility of email, coupled with the less passive nature of the internet in general, as readers, listeners and watchers became “users”. But the change really gained momentum with… Continue reading
Consider this my first attempt at a photoblog entry. For those who prefer video or text you can see both at http://www.ejc.net/seminars/picnic_2007_3
One for the diary: The latest Journalism Leaders Forum from the University of Central Lancashire in Preston is on the theme ‘Local Turf Wars – Notes from the digital news frontline’ Continue reading
Online Journalism Blog 