Craig McGinty

When protectionism enables opportunity, for others

YESTERDAY'S meeting of the Digital Editor's Network and the Journalism Leader’s Forum in Preston has produced a collection of comments and articles, which I suppose comes as no surprise considering we were talking about "money".

I think most people realised that there was little chance of getting to the heart of how media companies make their online ventures bring the cash in, but personally I wasn't expecting to be chatting with people about issues that I was dealing with five or more years ago.

Links at the heart of news gathering

I AM often asked how I source and follow news stories for my sites and I've written a piece about how I do it using RSS feeds and the importance of making them work for you, see using RSS feeds to stay up to date.

But journalism lecturer Paul Bradshaw has gone on a few steps further than me to look at ways to both track down and ultimately to receive news updates in your chosen field with a great piece entitled, RSS + social media = “Passive-Aggressive Newsgathering”.

Personally the thing I take away from this is the importance of the link; make it easy for others to link to you, but equally taking your readers to interesting destinations on the web can increase your presence on many of the networks that you are following and taking part in in the first place.

Greater Manchester Police on Facebook

I'M playing Devil's advocate here but with Greater Manchester Police building up a presence on Facebook that lets them issue localised news updates, promote video appeals and have their contact details just a click away, is another 'essential' role of newspapers being eroded?

Facebook has a new role - fighting crime in Manchester

Show me the money in websites

ONE of the first people I got up and running with a blog driven website was Phil Voice who started one for his holiday home in France, but has taken what he learnt from this to establish Landscape Juice.

Before crossing the Channel he ran a successful landscaping business in southern England and using his blog he's been able to establish his site as the "go to" blog style site for his industry.

His articles offer advice on all things landscaping, but also tips on running a landscape business and making a success of things during both the good and bad times.

A flying visit to Paris

A SPEEDY 24 hour visit to Paris late last week saw me drop in on my pal Susie, of IVY Paris, as well as spend a few hours at the home of TypePad in Europe.

Here is the evidence I was there, champagne glass in hand, but users of TypePad should look out over the coming months for many new tools to play with.

A much more open platform as well as better community features will be on the way, which should help those who want to take their sites on a step or two, as well as enable people to bring together their disparate spots on the web under one umbrella, or lily pad in the case of TypePad.

Inspirational story of Peter Apps

GREAT piece by Graham Holliday about the experience of Reuters journalist Peter Apps, paralysed from the neck down in a crash while working in Sri Lanka.

‘I visualised going out and interviewing’

"I don’t think most people expected I would get back to the stage of doing what is essentially a frontline markets reporting job where I’d be able to travel, go out and do interviews," he says. "That wasn’t something people visualised at the time of the accident. But I visualised it."

You really can't hang around waiting and wondering, you never know what life is going to serve up.

Just catching up

A QUICK collection of interesting articles I've crossed in the past couple of days:

He's got more columns than the Colosseum: the prolific Mr Letts
"I think we're probably the last generation that's going to make a living out of newspapers. I suspect in 10 years' time it's going to be much harder to turn a shilling."

How to live-blog a summit
"It became an exercise in ‘web 2.0′ - open source tools, free online services, RSS feeds, and a willingness to experiment."

The Churner Prize
"Denied the time, money and resources to do the job properly, many hacks now churn out stories without checking facts or sources."

Case study: Flying Pickle
"This case study demonstrates how a locally-focused blog attracted a following, advertisers and turned itself into a print publication."

Build a "normal" website with TypePad

ALL the blogs I run, and those I've helped others with, use the blogging service of TypePad as I've found it simple to set up, reliable and pretty flexible.

One of the features I really like is the Pages option, which lets you create standalone web pages free of elements such as comment forms, dates and permalinks.

BBC Manchester blog comes to an end

IT is sad to see that the BBC Manchester blog has pulled down the shutters and been closed, but all good things must come to an end.

Both Robin Hamman and Richard Fair linked out to Manchester bloggers from the site, but also arranged get-togethers which I am sure helped people link up and connect in a more "real" way.