The Evolving Newsroom

Staying with the 'what happens when you die these days' theme, the Guardian has a story by Dave Lee looking at what Facebook does when a member dies. Interesting.

My former colleague at the Telegraph in London, communities editor Shane Richmond, writes a surprisingly restrained blog post noting that the Telegraph overtook the mighty Guardian in the April ABCe audience figures.

This is truly an achievement, given how far behind the Telegraph was lagging just a couple of years ago when we began a change programme to revitalise the website with the help of newsroom staff who were previously tied solely to the group's newspapers.

Shane wrote:

"There's not much in it, so the lead may well change hands several times in the coming months, not only between us and the Guardian but perhaps also between us and the relaunched Mail. However, the field has changed and it will be that way for some time to come.

"Telegraph.co.uk's unique users increased by almost 10 per cent between March and April, and 153 per cent year-on-year, to 18,646,112. The Guardian dropped almost one per cent to 18,546,017 and slightly behind both of us are the Mail on 18,039,943.

"The credit crunch, the US election and the climax of the football season all helped to broaden our audience last month.

"However, the real achievement is to have closed the gap that existed this time last year. In the ABCe figures for April 2007, the Guardian were almost eight million unique users ahead of us, with 15.17 million uniques compared to our 7.35 million, and just over six million uniques ahead of Times Online, who were then in second place with 8.9 million."

On the other hand, here's what the Guardian had to say:

"The web measurement standards for the UK's national newspaper websites are to be reviewed after rival publishers questioned Telegraph.co.uk's dramatic recent traffic growth, adding 6.3 million unique users in two months.

"This meteoric unique-user growth culminated in Telegraph.co.uk overtaking guardian.co.uk as the UK's most popular national newspaper website in figures for April released today by the web traffic measurement body ABCe.

"Prompted by concerns raised by rival newspaper groups the Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards, which advises ABCe on its measurement methods, has today agreed to a review of the tools and standards that publishers use to record web traffic."

The Guardian is increasing community content as part of the ongoing redesign of its website, working closely with social media company Pluck, according to journalism.co.uk.

"A new community area is planned for later this year which will aim to identify the 'most useful' members of the Guardian's community of readers and develop a means of asking them questions and gauging their opinions on specific topics, director of digital content Emily Bell told the audience at the Guardian's Changing Media Summit."

"The focus on user-interaction has been strengthened by the success of the arts, sports and Comment is Free sections of the site, Bell added, which have shown a 100 per cent year-on-year growth in page impressions and unique users since adding commenting facilities for readers."

Interesting that the focus for the new community area appears to be picking the brains of the 'most useful' members of the community rather than, say, extending the community and letting readers blog as telegraph.co.uk and The Sun have done.

The embedded media player that lets you listen to podcasts on the page you're reading. Much nicer than those swirly patterns normally served up with audio.

That said, if you want to navigate away from the page you're on you have to launch the player in a pop-up window to keep the podcast running. At least you get the choice.

I notice the Guardian has added a nice little feature at the bottom of stories which shows which page the story ran on in the paper, if it did, where it was first published and when it was last updated online:

"This article appeared in the Guardian on Saturday February 23 2008 on p1 of the Top stories section. It was last updated at 02:17 on February 23 2008."

It's a nice touch giving that context - where a story appears in the paper effectively reflects how many 'Diggs' it got at conference, how relevant or important it is. Stories considered most important are at front of section and top of page. Less important stories further in and lower down. So page numbers are a useful guide.

The Guardian's 'article history' doesn't appear to be working uniformly across the site yet, no doubt another feature of their recent redesign that's going to take a while to bed in. And it's not alone, the San Francisco Chronicle also includes page numbers, (thanks to Editor on the Verge, Yoni Greenbaum, for the link). I don't know if it's entirely automated or requires human intervention, but I hope it's resource-light and will catch on.

There's a lot of talk these days about the role of editors in news and whether it becomes defunct online because readers can now do the job of sorting important stories from weaker ones by voting on them, linking to them or ignoring them.

Readers can do those things, of course, and can find information directly and bypass news sites altogether if they want. But not everyone is that motivated and most of us don't have the time.

We still want editors to sift through the tide of information that surfaces daily and tell us which stories are most worthy of our attention. Their take on what's important is in itself useful information and I think their role remains crucial.

I was reminded of this the other day while talking to someone who regularly reads several online newspapers around the world. He said he wouldn't want news homepages to become lists of readers' favourites: "I like to see what the newspapers think is the big news of the day." The difference in style, priorities and political leanings of various news sites adds still more context to the daily parade of stories.

This is something those of us focused on redesigning news delivery should keep in mind. I love the community side of digital life and think it's essential for news organisations to dive into it. But not at the expense of exercising their own news judgement.

The Guardian has a Google map showing the locations of its staff around the world. To be fair, it's probably one of few papers with enough foreign-based staff to warrant using a world map. But still, it's a nice idea and would work just as well with a national or regional map.

My Telegraph is doing something similar, asking its members to show where they are on a world map, and then there's Twittervision which shows tweets as they happen from around the world and is surprisingly enjoyable to watch.

The value of maps as online tools came up in conversation the other day with general agreement that they were over-rated. The maps I've mentioned are pretty straightforward - all you have to do is look at them and maybe click on markers to read some text. But those small, embedded maps, where you have to zoom in and move the map about and wait for it to reload six times before you find what you want, can get annoying pretty quickly.

I was in despair yesterday trying to find a map of Hamilton to print out and stick on the wall so I could orient myself, now that I'm going to be there regularly as part of my work as Editor-in-Residence on the Wintec School of Communication journalism programme. Couldn't find any such thing, only a string of Google maps the size of a tissue. Map sellers rejoice, I'm going to go out and buy one.

I like the idea of geotagging and being able to use a map to find information relevant to where I live, work, whatever. And I really like the idea of news sites being the first place people think to look for information relevant to their area. But as a user, if technology limits mean the map slows me down I'd rather just scan some text and be on my way.

9.30 this morning, NZ time:

News of a big fire in London's Camden Market reaches me on Twitter via a news feed from Netherlands-based BreakingNewsOn. They seemed to be getting information from Sky TV.

By 10am NZ time, the Guardian had a picture and good story up complete with eye witness reports. The Times had a smaller report and was asking readers to send in pictures. The Telegraph and Independent had nothing, nor did the Evening Standard.

By 11am, nzherald.co.nz was running the story and asking New Zealanders living in London to send in pictures. Using a combination of Reuters reports, their own staff and TV coverage,they had a pretty good outline of the story. Stuff.co.nz didn't have anything.

At 11.10am a couple of google searches brought up coverage by BBC, CBC in Canada, AFP, AP TV, Sky, Jerusalem Post (carrying an AP report) and plenty more. Conspiracy theories and other conversations were under way on Yahoo Answers, Neogaff, Suzy's photos and elsewhere.

The BBC, in inimitable style, had a full report, pictures, video of eye witnesses and the scene, links to related sites including the fire service, Camden Council and Camden market, and was asking readers for information, pictures and video. (Shame international viewers have to sit through an insurance ad before the video footage plays, kills the sense of immediacy somewhat).

By 11.45am, Guardian had really fleshed out the story, as had Sky and BBC. Times had added three pictures and NZ Herald one (all agency pics). Telegraph had nothing, Stuff was running Reuters copy and pic, the Independent had PA copy with no picture and the Evening Standard was running a headline on the ticker. TV3 was running APTN copy and video, TVNZ had Reuters copy with no footage.

Notably, search for 'fire', 'camden' and 'london' on YouTube brought up nothing. Am I missing something? No sign of ugc on any of the news sites yet, all agency footage and eye witness commentary gathered by reporters on the scene.

The other day a friend said: I'd subscribe to the paper if I could just have the bits that I want. I don't want the business section or the sport section or the careers section, just the news section and magazines.

She doesn't like watching unread papers go straight into her groaning recycling bin. Me, I've no time for the magazines and would be happy with News, Business and a Technology section if there was one. You might well opt for News, Sport and nothing else, or just Sport.

This is, of course, exactly what we are able to do online by using an RSS aggregator or customisable homepage.

But what if newspapers could do it too? What if they could nail a way to distribute different configurations of their sections - perhaps a set number of options: the full edition, business edition, lifestyle edition or sport edition, say - and only make them available to subscribers. I don't know enough about print configurations or distribution channels to know if this is at all possible. Any thoughts?

It came to mind when I was re-reading a post from John Duncan, a former managing editor of the Observer and now an international newspaper consultant. Mr Duncan, who is unconvinced that the economics of online newspaper publishing stack up, says this: "The effort expended on making newspaper websites passably useful online would be far better spent on making newspapers more competitive and useful in print.

"More flexible distribution would be a start, so we could offer a different product to different people and get it to them when they want to read it. Better products help too. The Observer sells more copies now than it did in 1995 thanks to the past seven years of product innovation."

His post has been kicking around for a while but is worth a read. If you're a digital skeptic it will make your day. He's done some fairly comprehensive comparative maths on the Guardian online vs print and come up with the following: "Even after 10 years of spectacular growth, with broadband penetration now high and newspapers said to be in danger of total irrelevance, The Guardian is still read by vastly more people in the UK than Guardian Unlimited."

Pluck is to supply community tools to Guardian website. This from Press Gazette.

The Guardian has added a feature where registered users can keep a clippings file on the site (it replaces their Saved Stories feature).

The clippings file has its own url. You can link to it and don't have to be signed in to see it so you can share the link with anyone. You get an RSS for it as well.

I noticed they're calling RSS a Webfeed, which I like. Much more intuitive. I hope it catches on.