Craig McGinty

Journalism and media events taking place

IT is the first day of May and the next couple of weeks are set to be busy times for journalists and media folk around the region.

Here is a quick round up of a few events that are sure to draw a crowd.

JEEcamp in Birmingham, Friday, May 8
With more than 60 people set to attend this 'unconference' style event proved very popular last year and looks set to be another cracker in 2009.

The rough outline for the get together is to talk about how on earth journalists and publishers can make a living from journalism in the era of free information, what the challenges are, and what we've learned so far.

Digital Britain Unconference in Manchester, Tuesday, May 12
Part of a series of events taking place across the country to discuss the issues raised by a recent government paper on the future of digital in the UK.

The meeting is being held at the offices of the Manchester Digital Development Agency, on Portland Street, with ideas and proposals being fed back to government.

Digital Editors Network in Preston, Tuesday, May 12
Gathering together digital editors for newspaper and media websites from around the north west, the Digital Editors Network will be looking at user generated content.

How to incorporate it into a site, the benefits that sites can gain from working with readers will be highlighted, but also some of the pitfalls.

Journalism Leaders Forum in Preston, Tuesday, May 12
The forum takes place in the early evening after the Digital Editors Network, and this time will play host to Culture Secretary Andy Burnham, as well as the head of news at ITV, Richard Frediani.

Up for discussion will be the future of newspapers and the role they play in the local community, hopefully Andy Burnham will be able to provide a little more on how government can help local journalism at a post-code level.

Social Media Cafe Special Event in Manchester, Thursday, May 14
If you have not been able to get along to a Social Media Cafe meeting then you are missing out on chatting and speaking to people from a wide variety of backgrounds.

And you have extra reason to get along to this month's get together as it will form part of the Futuresonic Festival in Manchester, and so will be taking place at the Contact Theatre on Oxford Road.

It's a two-way street this internet stuff

ONE of the biggest errors newspapers have made in recent years is to forget that they are part of a community.

In the past newspapers were often at the centre of things, so every cough and sniff was covered, which is what readers wanted, and still do.

Over the years newspapers put barriers between themselves and their readers, in a physical sense many local offices were closed and in a community sense they began to ignore and dismiss what readers were doing.

The internet has now made it possible for 'birds of a feather to flock together' and so local community groups and organisations no longer need newspapers in the same way as the past.

Unfortunately few newspaper management teams have broken out of the newsroom and looked to engage with these groups online, and been what many call a platform, Jeff Jarvis describes how magazines could provide this.

But when newspapers do try to use some of these new tools and online destinations, they still only look to use them to 'push' content out to readers - blissfully unaware that they are in a push'n'pull world, one where communities and individuals are sharing and helping each other.

A case in point this morning is the use of Twitter by the Lancashire Evening Post (LEP) as it looks to source comment from people who experienced an earthquake that shook homes across the north of England.

They sent out a tweet saying: "A minor earthquake has been felt in Fleetwood, Thornton and in north Lancashire - anywhere else folks? Please email lep.newsdesk@lep.co.uk"

And Twitter is a good way of picking up feedback and comment from people, but it works both ways.

Since the beginning of April the LEP twitter account has sent out around 30 messages, a mix of automated headlines, tweets to get people to buy the newspaper and the odd joke or observation.

It replied to one other person on Twitter in an attempt to get a story, but didn't forward the comments, or retweet, any messages from the local Preston community in that time.

And newspapers wonder why they are being ignored, its a two-way street remember.

Want to see how an organisation uses Twitter effectively? Follow the Dogs Trust.

Tips and thoughts on Addiply

IT has been six months now since I started running the roll-your-own advertising service Addiply on my main website This French Life.

In a nutshell it offers publishers a chance to put businesses in front of a tightly focussed readership so that the two can meet and hopefully generate a long running connection between the two parties.

Here is my explanation to businesses of how to advertise on This French Life, so I won't go into great detail on that side of things, but I thought I'd write a piece on how I am making it work from a publisher's perspective.

I have come to realise that the advertising service can be seen as a way to support and connect people, which ultimately benefits my own site, because if everyone ups-sticks and heads out of France my site is snookered.

So I have looked at ways to ensure that advertisers get plenty of 'bang for their buck' and offered a price of 50p per 1,000 page views, this lets people pay £10 and their advert will be displayed 20,000 times, which is not a bad deal.

Something that I do stress, and which is pretty unique when compared to other competitor sites, is that a business owner's advert will appear on every page of the site (approximately 3,200) - very often people will only have the chance to appear in different sections.

And it is with this in mind that I have placed the advertising strip at the top of the right hand column of my site because I know it is a 'hot spot' and so readers will be able to see the services on offer.

When I first started using Addiply I of course did not have a vast number of people signed up so the first strip of adverts displayed just three available blocks, and I even opened an advertiser account myself and placed my own advert in there so it appeared populated.

There is a bit of psychology at play here, because like a forum without any posts, no one seems willing to go first but with an advert from myself I began to see people take up the option to try it out.

Another thing I do is every Friday write a very simple thanks to site advertisers post so that people who read the site via RSS are notified of those businesses helping the site, and I also include a link to the page that highlights how to advertise on the site.

One little techie point about this thank you post is that I place a no follow tag around the links to the websites of those companies currently advertising.

The only reason I do this is because search engines penalise so-called paid for links, and whilst I can vouch for all the websites that advertise on This French Life and would prefer to offer up a regular link, I don't want to run the risk of being penalised in search engine results.

I do think it is worth writing a simple guide to the advertising option as it not only allows browsers of the site to read it, I offer a link to it at the top and bottom of each page, it also lets you quickly send a link across to people who contact you directly.

You will also see that on this page I highlight those advertisers who have used the service which act as testimonials.

And I wouldn't be afraid to drop a line to people you write about in articles, especially events that are set to take place soon, as often organisers will have a little money set aside for advertising and I would say, impartially of course, that a locally focussed website is the best option.

It is still early days in the life of small, online publishers running financially viable operations, but if you begin to see things from the perspective of enabling connections to take place between businesses and readers I really believe the balance is tipping our way.

A shout out for AudioBoo

Walking through Audioboo from Mark Rock on Vimeo.
IN January I spent an entertaining evening down in London discussing different methods and techniques independent publishers could use to make a success of locally driven websites.

One of the tools featured was AudioBoo, which at the time was very close to being launched and offers an audio publishing service on an iPhone.

The developers of the services, Best Before Media, recently made it publicly available for iPhone users to install for free on their phones.

AudioBoo is designed as a very simple way to record conversations and then publish them to the AudioBoo website, but it is also possible to embed the recording into your own site as well as notify Facebook and Twitter of new recordings, or Boos.

As you can see from the video above it is possible to tag a Boo with descriptive words, assign a photograph and it also uses the geolocation facility in the iPhone to plot a point where the recording was made on a Google map.

The potential for journalists to use this was highlighted this weekend by James Hatts of the LondonSE1 website, who reported from a fire on New Kent Road.

The ease with which this service could be used during sport matches, local events and festivals, as well as interviews really opens up an opportunity for local journalists to feed stories back into their websites, as well as other corners of the web.

Audioboo: Can it be used for news reporting? Some case studies - Journalism.co.uk

A link collection to click through

HERE is a quick selection of interesting points out on the internet that may prove useful:

Birmingham Post: A Regional Newspaper Case Study

View more presentations from joannageary. (tags: pr media)

Case study of the work undertaken by UK regional newspaper the Birmingham Post by Joanna Geary

Newspapers' supply-and-demand problem (Why you should quit doing what everyone else is)

“Facebook causes cancer” - Dr Ben Goldacre (again) has to be the questioner when journalists should be doing this themselves

Social networking benefits validated - Washington Times

Business models of news

A Google Map of UK independent news blogs

Learn online advertising before using 'nickel and dime' tricks

THE wonder of the web can often offer you a glimpse of the future through someone's online creativity, then again it can shoot you back about five years in a click.

That's where I travelled when I read a piece about setting up a payment scheme to read the New York Times website.

It just starts all wrong by thinking the 20 million unique visitors a month who visit the site will cough up on average $1 a month to read articles, providing a yearly revenue of $240m.

To put it blunty, they won't. You'll just end up with a small percentage, maybe just one per cent of the 20 million (based on the one per cent, nine per cent, 90 per cent rule), willing to pay for access, so know you are looking at £2.4m a year.

Take off the cost of running the subscription service and the cost of promoting it, plus advertisers wondering where all the readers have gone and you begin to see the holes develop.

But many believers in payment barriers point to the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal as examples, they are, but not in the news market they are in the financial information market.

Some people are willing to pay a subscription if they can make financial profit, people won't pay to gain 'social profit' from reading articles on the New York Times when there are plenty of other destinations on the web they and their friends can profit from.

Let's face it we are not short of articles on the latest from Washington or Westminster, but insight and figures on a range of businesses in a compact and easy-to-profit-from format is something that is niche and of value.

Clay Shirky has spent many more hours than myself looking into the world of online micro payments and he deals with the argument for charging to read the New York Times with extreme thoroughness.

But if news websites can't charge for content what can they do?

Well for a start they could open up their eyes and take a look around the web at sites and individuals who are profiting online, instead of thinking they need to produce 'new' forms of advertising.

First off they need to read up and gain experience of what works online, instead of listening to people who claim you can't make money from blogging (via Nigel Barlow), learn and study from those who already are.

A couple of quick examples, the first of which is Cheapflights.co.uk who reckon to have 'generated travel product sales of over US$1.8 billion for its advertising partners in 2006' (in notes to editors).

Or maybe the individuals who made six figures from Google Adsense or sold just under £5 million of products for companies through affiliate marketing.

The common element these three examples have is that they have spent time, energy and to various degrees money to understand and expand their knowledge of generating income online.

It is in this direction that thoughts and ideas should be directed, not wasted on, as Clay Shirky describes it, 'nickel and dime' methods of charging people to read news that is ubiquitous, so where to start?

I think it is important that journalists see themselves as publishers, not only to bring knowledge to the company they currently work for, but in case they join those who have already been shown the door in recent months.

Read these two articles by online publisher Robert Niles:

The ethical journalist's guide to selling ads on a website: Part one

and

The ethical journalist's guide to selling ads on a website: Part two

Then break out of the mentality of churning through the same old advertisers that a newspaper sales team always turns to.

There is a growing number of businesses out there who are aware they need to do more online, but they need help, support and different means to advertise their services.

Look to increase the size of the advertising pie, instead of always choosing the same pie dish.

Update: Paying for the news: A link-a-thon (via Markmedia)

Quick link round up

JUST a collection of interesting articles I've crossed in the past couple of days that might be worth a quick look:

Email campaign case studies (one good, one bad) - Seth Godin
I am sure a few people will have heard me rattle on about the importance of having a newsletter for your online publication or business website, here's why.

A permission campaign, on the other hand, only grows in value, until it gets big enough that you can build an entire business around it.

Twitter, marketing and the devil - Matt White
I've seen a lot of businesses jump onto Twitter and basically use it to put their products in front of people.

It just doesn't work because people decide to follow others, so really you are just tweeting in an empty room.

Instead use it as a method of discovery for both yourself and for those who follow you.

What would you call someone who uses a program to automatically send you an annoying volume of email? A spammer. So what makes you think that because it’s 140 characters and on some trendy web service that blasting away with soulless and automatic links isn’t spam?

Times Online flunks journalism 101 - Don Mills Diva
Another example of shoddy practice by supposed 'established' journalists. This time lifting quotes from a blogger's website, making them appear as if it was an interview and not providing readers with a link so they could find out more.

But I feel furious because I was never interviewed for the story and had no idea I even appeared in the story until my daily Google Alert for Don Mills Diva lead me there.

Contributing to the Landscape Juice 'Honesty box' - Landscape Juice Network
An idea we are trying on the Landscape Juice Network to raise income to feed back into the service and improve it.

Phil has asked that users of the site consider donating an amount from any business they've generated through the site, leaving it up to people to decide how valuable the network is to them.

The site will remain free to use, but members are well aware that it takes time to oversee, and that if they gain from the growth the network is enjoying then providing a way to say 'thanks' can hopefully provide more benefits.

The network has also launched quite a few partnerships, brokered business transactions and provided opportunities. Some press items released through Landscape Juice have secured businesses a high profile slot in search engine rankings.

Providing opportunity for independent publishers

Hello AudioBoo from Mark Rock on Vimeo.
IF freelancing wasn't already a horribly precarious profession, the news that The Sun and The Times are cutting dramatically their freelance pay scales really should be a wake up call.

For a long time now I have stressed to every freelancer I've met that whilst I wouldn't recommend jumping ship and starting your own online project straight away, look seriously at ways to slowly transfer from writing for others to creating your own online publication in a field that interests you and that you know well.

Freelancers often have a particular subject area they are good at, but even if they don't they still live somewhere and so bringing journalism skills to cover a postcode patch may be something to consider.

This was the outline for a bit of a gathering earlier this week in London organised by Rick Waghorn and described as a meeting of Very Independent Publishers, Rick's write up is here (also see Shane Richmond's post).

During the evening there was a feeling that if a package of tools is made available, Rick used the analogy of a brew kit, people could make their choice of what to use and make a pint of bitter or lager; then again it could be a glass of red or white wine.

The package would be blog based, with the opportunity to publish audio and video interviews at the click of a button, whilst also offering an advertising option to local businesses.

What was being stressed throughout was that it should be a simple package that gave individuals the choice to pick and choose the tools they wanted to use.

Ultimately you want journalists to be out and about reporting, as this is where the stories, the characters and connections are found not via press releases on company websites.

And what could an operation like this look like? Also there on the night was Simon Perry of the Ventnor Blog and James Hatts of the LondonSE1 website, take a click around.

Meetings, courses and get-togethers

THERE is plenty of opportunity to meet people and brush up on a few of your creative skills over the coming weeks in and around Manchester.

Here are just some of he talks, courses and get-togethers I've crossed recently:

Thriving as a tech startup in an upstart economy - Beating the economic blues
Large companies are cutting down costs and headcounts with significant hits on R&D. In most cases all R&D spend has been frozen or cancelled.

This is a great time for tech startups to innovate, prove concepts and be there strong when the economy recovers, on Wednesday, January 28.

Social Media Cafe Manchester (#smc_mcr)
The last event saw six small break-out groups gather together around a table and a pint or two to discuss everything from starting up a blog, getting the best out of social media and using sites like Facebook in teaching.

The next event is sure to be just as interesting, challenging and involving regardless of where you consider yourself to be on the internet ladder, on Tuesday, February 3.

The transformation of newsrooms in the internet age - Digital Editors Network
Another interesting gathering together of newspaper people who have grasped the digital nettle and looked at ways to make it work in a news environment.

The network is free to attend and draws a number of journalists and website editors from the north west and the Midlands, with the added bonus of Robert Peston taking part in an early evening discussion on the impact financial journalism has on the economy, on Tuesday, February 3.

Interviewing skills for writers and journalists - Judy Goodwin
My journalist pal Judy Goodwin, who has offered up some simple PR tips in the past on the site, brings her experience to journalists and writers who have to interview people for their stories.

The all day course costs just £45 and I know friends have gained much from attending her courses, on Saturday, February 7.

Watch out here come the Yelpers

HERE is a quick look at some of the websites and articles I have sent through Twitter (@craigmcginty) today, as I've realised the service is becoming my personal link blog.

One way I keep track of what I've been sending around, and what others have said to me, is to subscribe to the Twitter RSS feed for my account and to set up keyword searches within Twitter, and again subscribe to the RSS feed, but anyway on to the articles.

Remember over the weekend the Sunday Times said that undertaking two searches on Google takes as much energy as boiling the kettle for a cup of tea.

They quoted physicist Alex Wissner-Gross and there was much criticism of Google especially as they are strong on all thing green.

However, it would appear that Alex Wissner-Gross wasn't exactly quoted correctly, he says himself he would have used coffee as an example instead of tea, and really his study was into the impact of computing in general not the search engine giant.

And newspapers still wonder why their sales are tumbling and advertisers are deserting them...

Last week saw the arrival of the US-based local business review site, Yelp, in the UK.

It is a simple idea, users write reviews of shops, restaurants and bars they visit, business owners can also be involved, and so fingers-crossed customers get a better service because owners have read what has been written.

For PR people with clients in the leisure and retail trade it is another destination to keep an eye on for 'brand management' purposes, and if you wonder just how influential Yelpers are take a look over Chrissy's reviews of places in Manchester and the connections she has made.

Chrissy actually lives in Philadelphia, but was originally from Manchester and you can be pretty sure should her friends on Yelp ever head this was they will be checking her out for pointers.

And I wonder how long it will be before we see out first court case brought by a business against a Yelp review?

One news piece on my list of 'must do' is an interview with Chris Anderson, he of The Long Tail, who speaks about his latest book Free: The Future of a Radical Price to BBC Radio 4.

With free in mind, it is interesting to see a piece about the improvements in micro-payments paid for via mobile phone, while elsewhere the idea of making payments via an iTunes type service has been chewed over, and rejected, by Jeff Jarvis.

Some still wonder if payments can be charged for news, I still doubt it because on a national/international level it would require all news producers to come to an agreement.

While on a local level, the costs of production are practically zero, especially if a one or two person operation is willing to cover a post code area for free and gain income from elsewhere.

Also many companies are heavily involved with online advertising through affiliate marketing and they will always need pages to appear on, so whether you could generate enough payment out of a small geographical patch to beat advertising and affiliate revenue is open to question.

And before I go here are ten things every journalist should know in 2009.