Jo Wadsworth

Cover it Live test

noreply@blogger.com (Jo Wadsworth) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 11:55:00 +0000

After months of resisting, I am finally trying out Cover it Live. Here goes:

test

My top Twitter tips

noreply@blogger.com (Jo Wadsworth) — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 14:43:00 +0000

A few colleagues have been asking questions about Twitter lately, and although there are some great Twitter tip lists, I don't think there's been anything written recently aimed specificially at regional journalists, so I figured it could be handy if I had a stab.

Firstly, it would be worth going over why you should try it in the first place. I've found it's great for boosting traffic, but even more so for keeping your finger on the pulse of what interests an online audience - for newsgathering, and just reminding people not only that you're here, but that you're part of the community - and drawing them into it too.

So if you want a go, here's some advice.

Getting started

Before you start, it's essential to get yourself a good avatar and bio so people know who you are, what you intend doing on Twitter, and hopefully that you're going to be interesting enough to follow back.

Follow as many local tweeple as you can
Use the Find People search in Twitter, which allows you to search by location
Set up an RSS feed via www.search.twitter.com for placenames to see who's tweeting about your area.
Find established accounts (I had @brightonfeed, @brightonhovecc) and follow their local followers
Look out for lists of people living in your area like this one (tip - people's profiles show both which lists they've created, and which lists they're on). You can find more on Listorious, although it's far from comprehensive
Use Trendsmap, if it has a page for your neighbourhood

There are other applications like Twitterlocal, but I've not found them that useful as they're not as accurate as you'd like in identifying where people actually are

Every time you follow someone, they get an alert telling them, so hopefully a good few of them will follow you back. But beware following too many people at once - you're less likely to be followed if you're following far more people than you have following you.

Getting going

I won't go through the nuts and bolts of how Twitter works - loads has been written on that already. I found Shane Richmond's post here useful when I started out (last updated Jan 2009). Mashable also has a great range of articles on all aspects of Twitter.

Good things to tweet are news and newsroom insights. If your paper doesn't already have an account using Twitterfeed to autopublish your stories, set one up as it's the quickest way to give people news by retweeting. People love insights into how their news is put together. so you can probably be more naval-gazing than you think (my second-most popular link was our style guide!). But be very careful not to inadvertently mock contacts, use any trace of gallows humour, or give away exclusives.

@reply to people. Nobody expects you to sit on Twitter all day, but when you do log in, chances are someone will have said something interesting you can respond to. You'll also find lots of local interest tweets which cry out for a response from your RSS feed of local mentions. Don't worry about not knowing the person who's tweeted - they won't mind.

RT (retweet) people. First of all, it will make the person you RT feel interesting (and if you're RTing them, they are). Secondly, it's an easy way of being interesting yourself. Lastly, it shows that you're engaged in what's going on, and not just in broadcasting your own links.

Crack (clean) jokes. Try and be witty. Channel your inner Dorothy Parker. And avoid tweeting about your lunch or anything personal that a stranger wouldn't find funny or interesting (although having said that, it's often the more personal tweets which get the biggest response).

Follow the principles of a good community manager, even though it's not your community you're managing. Be consistent and firm, but responsive and ready to apologise if you've messed up - which, at some point, you inevitably will. But if you say sorry, chances are most people will respect you more afterwards than they did before.

And more

Consider using hashtags. We use two - #bricom as part of our Save Our Service campaign, and #brightoh to help compile our Overheard in Brighton blog.

Crowdsource. If you need general case studies, Twitter's a great bet. the other day, it even managed to track down a woman who walks a ferret around Brighton in under an hour.

Take it into the real world. If there are local tweet-ups, go to them. If there aren't, organise one. Twestival is a great thing to get involved in.

Any more suggestions?

Helping Brighton investigate

noreply@blogger.com (Jo Wadsworth) — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 13:37:00 +0000

Well yesterday was exciting. Let me explain.

A few weeks ago, Paul Bradshaw approached a group of us in Brighton and Hove who'd signed up for his collaborative investigations site Help Me Investigate. He wanted to know if we would be interested in working together to make it take off here. Since then, I've been talking to people about it (mainly the editor and Mark Walker of SCIP, who I'm working with on their community reporters project) and yesterday, another email from Paul kick-started it into action.

He suggested we begin by coming up with an investigation we'd be happy to start with - and so I've come up with some ideas myself (I think my favourite is the Godless one). I've deliberately made them fairly ambitious, as I'd really like to test what we can use Help Me Investigate to do. And I'm hoping anyone who's interested in joining us will make their own suggestions here too. Oh, and if you want to help us investigate, then sign up here.

How does Brighton's status as UK's most Godless city affect it? Looking at measurable manifestations of Christian values, e.g. amount given to charity, number of neighbour disputes. Go through 10 commandments and see if you can find some kind of measurement for each.As Brighton Pride seemingly lurches from one crisis to another, an analysis of its history, turnout, charitable donations and finances.
How liberal is Brighton? Its image is of a liberal enclave, but it has a Tory council. Breakdown of voting history by ward/across Brighton vs Hove over past 20 years - maybe finding a representative group of people to do survey of views?
Should Brighton divorce Hove? Looking at what political make-up of Hove and Brighton would be if they divorced, and trying to predict how key council policies/spending power might have been affected as a result.

Warts and all

noreply@blogger.com (Jo Wadsworth) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:41:00 +0000

Every day, we read about how journalism is changing forever. And so it should - not just because of the opportunities online offers, but because of some bad habits MSM has got into. Far cleverer people than me are debating which qualities should be saved - but I thought it would be fun to compile some of the more, er, frivolous aspects, specifically of local newspaper life which I hope will endure.

First up, and inspired by the reaction I got to this tweet today - the honourable tradition of newsdesk ritually humiliating reporters by making them do stupid stuff - all in the name of a good read. Dressing up is the favourite - tweets and office banter revealed we've been made to dress up as dogs, chipmunks, Lara Croft, monks, pirates, 1930s spivs and David Beckham. At my last place, we even had an arrangement with the local fancy dress shop - costumes for plugs. Abseiling was also a surprisingly popular choice, with @dankerins revealing he'd been made to: "abseil 220ft with a 92-year-old woman, whom I had to interview half way down. Interview was one word long."

The beguiling hush which falls over the office when someone gets a challenging call. Usually the person on the other end is a little unhinged and the reporter can be heard excitedly getting details of the scoop, gradually realising there isn't one, then desperately trying to get them off the phone. Other favourites are the mum of the guy who's just been up in court over some unpleasantness threatening to "have you" for printing her little darling's name - and the 100th birthday girl so deaf the reporter has to shout embarrassingly dull questions at the top of their lungs: "How has life changed since you were a girl?"

The way office banter turns into stories. You get a phonecall about a missing tortoise, which sparks a conversation about how far it could have crawled since going awol - hey presto, there's your page 3, complete with cut-outs of Tommy the tortoise wearing a beret, on top of Stonehenge and perched on the shoulder of the Angel of the North. I'm sure there are many more examples out there (This one's probably closely linked to the ritual humiliation one).

Gallows humour. I still want a job tomorrow, so I won't post any examples. But feel free to leave yours...

Puncturing pompous, jargon-laded or just plain incomprehensible official-speak. Best example I've heard recently is from @murraykelsoWM who tweeted: "Ambulance quote: 'She suffered injuries incompatible with life". No, really. That was the quote. I didn't make it up. You couldn't.'

And closely related to that would be developing an acute sense of moral outrage, which can be sparked by the important or the trivial, but especially when denied the opportunity to report something, comparable to that seen with this week's Carter-Ruck vs The Guardian saga.

Hearing about stories which no family friendly newspaper could run. A dog born with two willies was a recent one. The way every single bin in Brighton has been vandalised so instead of having slots labelled Butts and Gum, they invite Butt and Cum is another. Related - daring the news editor to see if he can sneak said stories into the paper under the editor's nose.

More treats can be found on Stuff Journalists Like, Newsroom Quotes and a recently discovered favourite, Glum Councillors.

Advertising moving online - but where?

noreply@blogger.com (Jo Wadsworth) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 19:54:00 +0000

Some interesting stuff has come out over the last week or so about online advertising.

Last week, it was reported that online advertising had become the biggest advertising medium, overtaking TV for the first time. Great news for those working in online news, right? Hmmm.

Here's econsultancy.com with their recommendations on where to spend your money online. And notable by the absence is any kind of advertising which news sites might currently benefit from. Paid search? Tick. Web design? Tick. Social media? Tick. Display ads, directories or classifieds? Er, no.

As one of the commenters says, you need to take this list with a pinch of salt as it comes from "an SEO company and is therefore biased towards a reductive click-based model of online marketing" but I'm not sure it's that far off the mark when it comes to where smart companies are thinking about spending their budgets.

Take studies like this one from Qube which found in one particular case social media was 23 times more effective than banner ads (as a social media agency, they would say that, wouldn't they - but those figures are pretty striking).

Of course advertisers have always found ways to avoid shelling out for adverts. Every hack knows about the bogus survey - a poorly researched top of the pops on a subject vaguely related to the product, usually with a pointless embargo, which are a) easy and cheap to report b) insanely popular with readers. One dropped into my inbox yesterday. We ignored it, but a quick Google News search shows about two dozen plus sites did publish today.

But the difference here is that social media allows brands to bypass mass media entirely. And it's not just commercial brands - it's also local authorities, celebrities, politicians, lots of the people who previously relied on the papers to get their message out there.

Are we feeling irrelevant yet?

How can you make community correspondents your colleagues?

noreply@blogger.com (Jo Wadsworth) — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 18:00:00 +0000

I was having a really interesting chat with another web editor today about the merits of community correspondents.

Their point was that by relying on community correspondents to cover grass roots parish pump news, you are cutting reporters off from the contacts they need to get to grips with their patch. My counter was that by enlisting people to write them themselves, they become colleagues rather than contacts, and surely that's an even more valuable relationship?

Clearly though, for this to work the news site has to foster this relationship. Since coming to The Argus six months ago, I haven't done this as well as I would like, and as I embark on a renewed push to get this going, I'm after ideas on how to make it work.

Northern Echo editor Nigel Burton spoke here about how they do it. Interestingly, their citizen journalists get paid, which sadly is not an avenue open to me. So how else can it be done?

Some ideas I'm going to be trying out:

Regularly emailing the group of correspondents with stats from the site, to show how many people are visiting it.
Making the sections more than just newslists, using Steve Yelvington's theory of the three basic roles local sites should play.
Emailing new correspondents every time they upload a story, with an encouraging comment
Setting up an area on our forum for correspondents to swap tips with each other
Seeing whether it's possible to plug sites and correspondents' contact details alongside stories from their patch in-paper

I'm also considering changing my tack, which up until now has been very much to say this is your part of the site, you can do what you want with it. I think a more common motivation is wanting to be part of The Argus. Maybe asking them to stick by the style guide, rewriting intros and being more demanding when they ask how often they should upload would reap more rewards? After all, if they wanted to do it completely on their own terms, they would have set up a blog, wouldn't they?

Any other ideas gratefully received.

Brighton and Hove's social media ambitions

noreply@blogger.com (Jo Wadsworth) — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 23:20:00 +0000

Brighton and Hove City Council is advertising for a social media officer, I discovered today.

My first reaction was to laugh. Then I saw the salary (more than I've ever earned), my news editor hat came on again, and the story of a council paying someone good money to play about on Twitter and Facebook took over. Now, although I will defend the validity of that angle to the hilt, I've had a bit more time to reflect, and I'm more in two minds.

It's way past my bedtime, so some quick thoughts (many prompted by @artistsmakers):

Why do you need a separate press officer to perform this role? As @artistsmakers pointed out, social media is just a tool to talk to people - it's the equivalent of hiring someone to type and send emails.

Perhaps that's disingenuous of me though - the fuller job spec says part of the role is to "evangelise, train and coach staff on the implementation and use of new technologies such as blogging and tweeting". So will normal council staff be allowed to use social media? (I'm told that Facebook etc are currently blocked.)

If council staff are let loose, will they be allowed to respond to tricky questions publicly, e.g. on a Facebook wall, on Twitter, or in the comments of a blog?

If so, will these responses have to be vetted in the way I'm sure B&HCC press responses must be? Surely that would be far too time-consuming? And kind of defeat the point of being open, accessible and accountable in the first place!

But if council staff are allowed to respond freely, then will journalists be allowed to ask questions in these online forums? And if they are, then where does that leave the press office? Could we be seeing a return to the times when journalists were able to talk to the horse's mouth? But now joined by citizen journalists too?

Interesting times . . .

Troll verse

noreply@blogger.com (Jo Wadsworth) — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 17:16:00 +0000

I love my commenters, even the trolls. In fact, sometimes it's especially the trolls. Like this morning, when I came in to find one of my favourites (banned several times now) had re-registered just to post these two poems about me:

Wadsworth a journo so low
That she'd sunk as far as she could go
Got a job censoring Opinions........anything
What a total zero

There once was a dictator called Jo
Who thought she was in the know
She told her minions
What should be their opinions
She ended up with no friends, only foes.

I also love the people who follow me on Twitter. I tweeted the first this morning, and got these two lovely retorts back, the first from @callummay and the second from a DM:

Argus's readers so thick
That they can't even make a rhyme stick
So your website's replete
With comments to delete...

There was a young lady called Jo
A moderating so & so
She upset the ranters
Deleted the ravers
But the rest said 'thank f**k she saved us'

Getting going again

noreply@blogger.com (Jo Wadsworth) — Wed, 20 May 2009 20:37:00 +0000

I've been struck down by blog fear since moving to a new paper (The Argus), both because I'm unsure of how my new employers view personal blogs, and, I think more importantly, because I wasn't sure how my new colleagues would react! But as my job now involves giving advice on blogging, I figured I should dust it off again.

What inspired me today in particular was meeting one of our new community correspondents. She's obviously going to be a natural, intensely interested in her neighbourhood and compelled to tell people about it. But she was also way ahead in understanding how it all works online, without really seeming to think about it. She's not a digital native, yet she's taken to social media like a duck to water.

On a private forum she's set up she now has people from as far away as Spain begging her to keep them up to date with the quirky goings-on she's discovered in her home town. She showed me the many local picture galleries she's set up on her Facebook account, taken on her mobile phone, and the comments they've received. And she's already researched a story about the old hospital whose site her house is built on using forums, community sites and Hansard(!). It was more impressive than many would-be trainee reporter portfolios I've seen. But she wasn't boasting - she just thought I'd be interested.

So in part, I just want to boast on her behalf, as I already think she's amazing before she's even posted one story for us. But a more serious point, and one which has been hotly debated today, is Robert Picard's question: with enough people like her, what value can professional journalists bring to earn their paypacket?

Specialism is obviously one answer - on a local level, my answers, none remotely original, would range from the prosaics of law and shorthand (yes, shorthand), through the monetary incentive to sift through the dull (e.g. council meetings) to get to the gold, to simple longevity (of the post, if not the individual reporter) - it seems to me the biggest potential failing of most community sites and blogs is simply that those running them often give up. But I'm sure there must be many other answers out there.

And with longevity comes the power of the local newspaper brand, which is still very significant in bringing a community together. Up until now, my correspondent's audience has been negligible. But with the help of The Argus, it's likely she'll get a fair following - and being able to say she's writing for us will undoubtedly open doors for her on the ground too. I'm optimistic this project, and every other similar one from UK local newspapers, has a good chance of helping to solve the conundrum of where next for the regional press. Well, here's hoping . . .

Could recession prompt a blogging boom?

noreply@blogger.com (Jo Wadsworth) — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 22:00:00 +0000

I found myself wondering today whether one possible result of the recession could be a boom in blogging.

This is not based on any concrete facts, just a handful of phonecalls and emails. But I have noticed a slight increase in the number of random people approaching the paper in the last week or so asking about the possibility of writing for us. By random, I mean people without any journalism background or qualifications.

The numbers are still too small to amount to a trend, but it would make sense - if you've just been laid off, or think you might be about to, writing might seem like an attractive second career (if you haven't done your research about the state of the newspaper industry, that is).

Given the chances of getting paid work at a local newspaper this way are very slim right now, I wonder how many will turn to blogging as a way of showcasing their work instead. I'll certainly be suggesting they start doing so for us.

If it does happen, it will be very interesting to see how local newspapers react in areas where there hasn't been a strong blogging presence before. Will they become a real threat? Or will papers and their websites be able to embrace them at the beginning, to everyone's advantage? Here's hoping it's the latter.

Let it snow, let it snow

noreply@blogger.com (Jo Wadsworth) — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 20:45:00 +0000

Okay, so my new year's resolution didn't get off to the best start, but better late than never.

I'm blogging today because I've been struck by how today's incredible weather events have really shown how newspapers can take on - and outdo - TV and radio in covering breaking news.

The last time I experienced snow like this was during the Big Freeze in 1987, when I was very small. My memories may be getting a little mixed with the hurricane of the same year, but I can remember my mum tuning to the local radio to try and catch news of whether my primary school was open. There was also fairly comprehensive news there on transport and all other weather-related goings-on. But - you had to wait patiently through all the inane phone-ins to make sure you heard the news relevant to you.

Today, long before the schools opened, we had a first draft of school closures online - and our readers were helpfully adding to it before our scattered skeleton staff could. So I think newspaper websites win hands down there.

I lived in a town with a thriving daily newspaper, but I would be surprised if it managed to get its edition that day out to all the newsagents it usually did. However today, we had fairly comprehensive coverage online within a couple of hours, including readers' pictures and videos - as well as the equivalent of a week's letters pages by the end of the day.

I know I'm not saying anything new here - it's just that today really brought home the huge strides online journalism has allowed local newspapers to make in the last 20 years - and in that sense, the future looks bright.

Resolutions

noreply@blogger.com (Jo Wadsworth) — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 17:24:00 +0000

This is an early start to my New Year's resolution to restart this blog.

It's Boxing Day, and we've just had the annual chat about the funny stories my mum and late grandpa (who died in April last year) dug up in their family history delvings. But this year, with predictions of the end of local newspapers looking decreasingly doom-mongerish and increasingly prescient, I'm more conscious than normal about the role they've had in giving families like mine an insight into their forebears.

Some are grimly amusing - for instance the ancestress who told an inquest into her late husband's suicide by hanging that "he'd always been a bit odd". But the local rag's role in an investigation into our family's most darkest and thrilling secrets is nothing if not crucial.

I won't give names, as there are living relatives who would be aghast if I did (and who have sworn us to secrecy on even more scandalous aspects of the story spilled in a moment of indiscretion to this day . . .). But it's only through a local newspaper's thorough report of an inquest that we know quite how many people lied about how one of my male ancestors "died" about 20 years before the date on his death certificate - a delicately constructed web of lies which even included erecting a fake headstone in the local church's graveyard. And it's a tradition that reporters I have worked with were maintaining as little as 40 years ago, i.e. taking down the names of everyone who has attended a funeral as they leave the church, which has given us the scandalous detail that the "dead" husband attended his widow's funeral under an unmistakably fake name - truly the stuff of Wilkie Collins novels.

Since I last posted, the BBC's talk of extending its local coverage has come to nothing, and there's been grand talk of public subsidy of local newspapers in the future. I'm not remotely convinced this would be workable when it comes to day to day reporting of hard news - the conflict of interest between estates one to three and four is too big a stumbling block. But perhaps there is a case for a separated subsidy for this kind of reporting - the stuff of public record which nobody else is recording. If only so Christmas family myth-making sessions can draw on more of the truth - and therefore more scandal!

More moggies

noreply@blogger.com (Jo Wadsworth) — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 18:36:00 +0000

More feline fun at Advertiser Towers today.

A few weeks ago we discovered the unintentional power of the press when a story about a local cat sanctuary being overrun with unwanted pussies attracted more dumped cats than new homes. It didn't do much for Croydon's cat-loving reputation.

But today, we saw the flip-side after we published a story about some drug-dealers being evicted from their home. Buried at the bottom of the story was a reference to a black cat they left behind. As you can see, there are two comments about it, we also had phonecalls and this afternoon someone actually came to the office to enquire about the poor pussy. So my faith in the town's animal altruism has been restored.

I just hope we can find out what has happened to it . . .

Bringing up baby

noreply@blogger.com (Jo Wadsworth) — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 12:54:00 +0000

I'm coming to the conclusion managing a news website is like raising a child. Here's why:

1. At the beginning, it needs almost constant attention. Learning the ways of dealing with its needs is a very steep learning curve.

2. No matter how much others might coo over yours, they probably think theirs is much more beautiful and clever.

3. The first time it talks back to you is a truly special moment.

4. The first time it swears at you is a truly terrible one. But you'd better get used to it - it will happen a lot.

5. No matter how well prepared you are, you can never truly predict the disruption it will bring to your family.

6. Sibling rivalry with its older (print) brother is something you should ignore at your peril. Getting the two to play happily together takes time and patience.

7. The first time you're away, and it's left in the hands of baby-sitters, you can't help but check up on its progress. This is daft - don't.

8. You are always trying to broaden its horizons it by bringing it thought-provoking and informative material. This is good.

9. But no matter how well this works, it will often be more interested in the lighter side of life.

10. It might sometimes be led astray by mixing with the wrong crowd.

11. But when it meets and starts to play with more suitable new friends, you know it's on the right tracks.

12. Although you will never stop caring, it soon starts caring back, and helping you with your job.

That's it from me for now - anyone got any more to add?

Time out

noreply@blogger.com (Jo Wadsworth) — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 13:18:00 +0000

I've got a week off, but for various reasons I won't bore you with, I'm not jetting off anywhere exciting, but staying in sodden Streatham. But while it means I'm not able to go cold-turkey on Croydon, it will be quite interesting watching our site from as much of an outsider's point of view as I'm likely to get.

And it's been a pretty eventful weekend to have been listening in on - a promising footballer was stabbed to death outside a nightclub on Friday night. As with the tram crash the previous weekend, it would be a bit tasteless to discuss coverage of someone's death to make a point about online news. But I will say I am sure the speed with which the team were able to reveal the victim was a talented kid with a bright future helped challenge assumptions he was a gang member and accusations he therefore had it coming. Although judging by the comments, it hasn't stopped this, sadly.

Am I a spammer?

noreply@blogger.com (Jo Wadsworth) — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 21:11:00 +0000

I was a bit taken aback when a self-proclaimed Social Media Genius (wannabe) sent out a prickly tweet yesterday evening which I'm fairly sure was aimed at me. It was complaining about journalists following him. He only has 11 followers, and as far as I can see, I'm the only hack there - other than his friend @charlesarthur. I sent back a reply asking if he'd rather I unfollowed, but haven't heard anything back yet.

Given his social media proclamations, I'm of the opinion he should know better. But it got me to thinking - this isn't the first time people have been a bit taken aback at my signing up to follow them. There's nothing sinister in it - if people say they're from Croydon, or my summize search feed picks up mentions of it, I'll follow them - both to see what they're up to, but in the hope they'll follow me and I can make the website seem interesting enough to visit.

So far, only two people have blocked me. For the record, one was a girl who was into hip-hop videos. The other was someone pretending to be Dr Who's assistant Sarah Jane.

I'd hate people to think I was intruding on their innermost thoughts - but ferchrissakes, this is Twitter! Protect your updates if you want privacy, people. But another possiblity is newspapers are seen as another variety of spam - that would be pretty depressing.

I wanted to know if there's any kind of emerging etiquette on this for newspapers. I'd found this compilation of general Twitter guidelines, but they don't really cover this. But a post about an American company Zappos' experiences of doing pretty much the same as me, albeit for more purely commercial reasons, made me think twice. We may have genuine, if lofty ambitions of just wanting people to engage with their community via the paper/website - but if people aren't interested, maybe this is just another hard sell of something they'd rather not be confronted with? Ultimately, I have to ask - am I a spammer?

P. S. It's only taken one day for the editor to get the hint and start blogging again - I'll ignore the slightly grumpy start and say I'm glad he's back. And I guess I'll have to start thinking of embarassing things to do to give him enough material to keep it going . . .

News for sale

noreply@blogger.com (Jo Wadsworth) — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 21:53:00 +0000

I've just come back from a chat with a hacky friend tonight, who reminded me of one way the web has changed things for reporters which I don't think is often considered when looking at newsroom management and workflows. And that's that great perk of the job, selling your story.

It's a time-honoured tradition on local newspapers that if you've got a great scoop, you spend the evening before the issue hits the stands phoning the newsdesks of the nationals, trying to interest them in running your fantastic exclusive in return for hard cash. Sometimes the editor encourages this, sometimes it's done surreptitiously - but it always goes on. And it's not just the money - for a reporter wanting to jump onto the nationals, it's also a great way to get yourself noticed.

Now, when you're increasingly in the business of putting those scoops straight up online, this window of opportunity can disappear. Most of our reporters' sellable stories are still held over until the moment they've appeared in print, but not always.

It might not be an officially acknowledged perk, but I think it's definitely something which should be taken into consideration when considering the impact the web has on the reporting team.

I also wonder how it's going to impact on news agencies, which from where we stand seem to make a big chunk of their living from selling our stories when we don't get in quick enough. Will the fact it's getting so much easier for the nationals to check what gems the locals have thrown up from their London HQs via the web make any dents in their business model?

On an entirely separate note . . . I'm going to briefly touch on the editor's second appearance in the Guardian's Media Monkey column, which follows his stated intention to take a vow of silence after a blog post which attracted some unanticipated intention from the monkey last month. Even though I'm the news editor (almost) named and shamed in the original post (and he's spilled some of my more embarassing beans in the past ), I'm also sorry it's stopped for the moment. But I'm assured it is temporary (and probably something to do with other projects he's been busy with). I'll let you know when it's back up and running.

UFOs

noreply@blogger.com (Jo Wadsworth) — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 20:27:00 +0000

I did briefly think about writing about lessons learnt from our coverage of the Croydon tram crash, but I think it's still a bit too soon - both for reasons of taste, and because the story is still very much developing. So I'll come back to it another day.

Instead I'll write about the second biggest story we had on the site this weekend - the Purley Cross UFO:

Now, at the risk of attracting the ire of alien spotters, this story is clearly a load of bollocks. And although these stories always boost your stats, it's a spike made mainly from non-local readers (a significant chunk of our readership started to come from the States after we published this on Saturday).

So it's important to minimise the risk of alienating (sorry, sorry!) your regular readers - but not killing the story entirely, or making your site a target for the global I Believe community, angered by your dismissing their latest spot.

I think the reporter, Maheesha Kottegoda, did a great job at doing this here. It's clearly tongue in cheek, but doesn't jeer at the alien spotter either. And, while trying not to sound too self-congratulatory, it seems to have worked - most of the comments are in the same gentle fun-poking spirit - and from local readers.

It would be interesting to hear of anyone else's experiences of reporting aliens - do you think we should stop doing it altogether, and stick to reporting real news? Or is a bit of harmless fun just that - harmless?

The fear of crime

noreply@blogger.com (Jo Wadsworth) — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 20:46:00 +0000

This post isn't directly about online journalism, but it's inspired by a Twitter conversation with Martin Stabe about the Met's new crime maps, so I'm going to let it sneak in anyhow.

Yes, today the Met officially launched their new crime maps. We've been on deadline today, so I've not had a chance to look in depth at how they've changed from the beta version, so I will reserve full judgement. But as they only plot burglary, robbery and vehicle crime, I doubt they will be of huge use to us. As Martin's former colleague Patrick Smith pointed out when they were released in beta, there's a huge discrepancy between the actual crime figures, and what appears here. In Croydon in July, the Met's stats say there were 2,916 total crimes. The map's narrow criteria only highlights 656. A big difference - and interestingly, my calculations say the map is still out, as those crimes total 779 according to the "detailed" figures.

As someone who's twice reported crime in the past few weeks (a bag snatch in Streatham, and a road rage attack which was classified as an RTA in Croydon), I'm not sure how useful I find this personally. I'm more interested in violence against the person and sex crimes.

There's loads more you can say about this (see this conversation on a local forum), but I'm particularly interested in how this ties in with the police's management of fear of crime.

In recent years, police have become increasingly obsessed with fear of crime. And the solution seems to be cut off the media's access to accurately report it.

My first work experience placements, at local radio stations, featured daily trips to the police station to talk to the duty sergeant about all the notable crime from the last 24 hours. By the time I was a trainee on a local newspaper, this had been replaced with weekly meetings - then weekly meetings with a press liaison officer who had no formal training or, incredibly, access to the crime logs (she relied on posters in the loos asking officers to tip her off, which they generally didn't) - and in Croydon, even those were recently cancelled.

We have been asking for weeks for statistics about stabbings in Croydon - and nothing comes back. But last night, a garbled version of those very stats was given by a senior copper at a Croydon Council knife conference. We're fuming!

That same copper also trotted out the same argument we've been hearing lots lately - reporting knife crime makes youths more likely to carry knives to defend themselves, which makes them more likely to commit, or fall victim to stabbings themselves.

Where to start? For starters, the police have provided no evidence of this at all. This also assumes kids won't hear exaggerated and inaccurate accounts on the rumour mill (which I imagine has a much wider and quicker reach amongst teens than the local paper). And, most Croydon stabbings are gang related - I sincerely doubt a news story about a stabbing is going to push kids into joining gangs - the opposite, if anything. I could go on, but it's well trodden ground.

As I've been writing this, BBC London has aired a report about the maps which interviewed people in Croydon. It didn't say much about Croydon crime, but it did make the point about limited stats, and about there being no clear-up rate included either. Maybe the day's other crime data announcement, the push to get court results put online, will help. But I can't help but fear all the information will be neutered and managed to fall in with the fear of crime agenda until it's next to useless.

I really hope I'm proved wrong on this.

Football - it ruins lives

noreply@blogger.com (Jo Wadsworth) — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 21:21:00 +0000

Some days you've just got to take it on the chin.

A gremlin crept into our site today, and played havoc with our PA national football feeds (I've always maintained football is the root of all evil, and this just goes to prove my theory). The upshot was, we ended up with several month-old stories about Premiership teams. They weren't linked to the site, but fans from all over the world were finding them, through Google I guess, and they weren't impressed. And not impressed in such large numbers they were soon at the top of our Most Read and Most Commented tabs.

Here's the story which inspired the most comments. I knew there was no hiding from it when the comment about Noah and the storm went up. By the end of the day, and the advent of the bubonic plague and the man on the moon, I'd started laughing too - but it took a while.

Funnily enough, journalism.co.uk reporter Judith Townend tweeted about another story where the comments about a burnt chair in Kendal took off in even more inventive ways, even as our little debate was unfolding - although my personal favourite is one a bit closer to us, at the Surrey Comet, about a pigeon cull.

Parrots

noreply@blogger.com (Jo Wadsworth) — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 21:36:00 +0000

Thanks to Andy Dickinson, who blogged today about my colleague David Berman's parrot video. It's always great to see your friends' work appreciated.

I think this is my favourite of David's videos. We're still very much in video infancy, and this one probably appeals particularly to journalists - but I hope it makes readers (viewers?) laugh as much as it did us.

As I've said before, both David and I have been on a steep learning curve (self-taught, too) over the past few months - David particularly has been working incredibly hard to get his multimedia skills at top-notch level. It's really beginning to come together now, and I hope that will be showing in the site increasingly more over the coming weeks.

Please hold us to that!

Purley Mail

noreply@blogger.com (Jo Wadsworth) — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 11:56:00 +0000

I've been doing a round-up of Croydon community sites lately, and it's reminded me quite how good the Purley Mail is. It's a weekly email newsletter and basic website run by a former journalist, and member of the Purley Business Association Ken Trench.

It's a very niche product - and not just because it's so hyperlocal. It's obviously slanted towards business, but also deliberately avoids grimy crime - Ken told me his wife cannot bear to pick up the hard-nosed Croydon Advertiser because it depresses her too much.

It's a formula which, knowing his circulation, works very well. Even though we often have more Purley news, Ken's strength is his readers know he's focusing his sole attention on them.

This is something we can replicate with our hyperlocal sites, like the dedicated Purley section - but it's got me to thinking about how much you need to differentiate between how you treat each site to make each area feel special, not cloned. For instance, would you put stricter rules in place for commenters on the posh Purley site than the downmarket Thornton Heath one? Are there some areas in which you would take the view separating the site out far more is of more benefit than providing links to some of the more general parts of the site?

I think one answer could be to get our beat reporters to take more responsibility for their sites, making those judgement calls. It's something I hope we can work towards.

Meanwhile, in a cheerful article called Echoes of Dispair in the Guardian yesterday, Peter Wilby speaks about the pothole paradox - how potholes in your road are the most interesting thing in the world, but a mile away mind-numbingly boring.

He says hyperlocal sites are one answer, but they tread a fine line. I assume he means if you attempt to feed back mundane user generated content to the general newspaper, you will bore most other readers.

That's a problem which arises if you try and shoehorn that kind of content which, I think, only really works online into print. (It's undoubtedly a temptation for suits wanting to cut costs, and I hope one which won't make it into our newsroom.) But the technology which allows you to create endless variations on your content means it should be much easier to solve online.

Well, here's hoping . . .

The Third Man

noreply@blogger.com (Jo Wadsworth) — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 23:10:00 +0000

It's completely been a day of two halves. The morning was spent at Northcliffe HQ in Derry Street, meeting our web developers and discussing priorities for the next batch of upgrades and fixes to our sites. It was a really useful meeting, not least because it's always good to actually meet people you're working with. Now, when our web support bod Martin says "it's on the development list", instead of visualising a big list of tasks which need doing, I will think of a busy team of developers working on them.

Then, back to the office, to put the finishing touches to our big ambitious multimedia project, which goes live tomorrow. In the unlikely event anyone's reading this before 7am tomorrow, here's the preview page (I'll update tomorrow morning with the live page).

The one thing I'm most annoyed at is that I can't for the life of me get the Dipity timeline embedded - weirdly the CMS just keeps deleting all the code whenever I press save. Which, after this morning - and coming hot on the heels of Twittergeddon - has got me thinking about the value of third party software vs in-house solutions.

Now, chief photographer and videographer David Berman has been having all kinds of problems with our video hosting service, so much so that we've ended up using vimeo instead. Not an ideal solution in terms of branding (although but you could argue we've ended up with better looking videos as a result). However, we will need to get them onto our official one eventually, so they stay in our burgeoning video archive.

For me, there's no in-house solution available for interactive timelines and maps, so it was third-party or nothing. But having met our web developers today, I'm confident that one day we will have. Maybe not in the near future though, looking at that list . . .

It's also striking the two biggest headaches we have - video hosting and comments - are both outsourced.

So, where does that leave us? While we'll definitely keep using free services like Dipity and vimeo, it would obviously be better to have our own solutions. Otherwise, there's always the sense you're trying to force a square peg into a round hole - and of course, there's always the threat they suddenly cease to be.

But then, there's so much going on out there. Will our web team, however good, ever be able to keep up with the explosion of creative solutions to web publishing that's out there? And should they even try? Where do you draw the line on providing services yourself, and finding them elsewhere?

Dipity and Darnation

noreply@blogger.com (Jo Wadsworth) — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 22:45:00 +0000

This is a test to see whether I can get my Dipity timeline to embed in my blog, as it doesnt' seem to be working on the Croydon Advertiser website:

Exciting times

noreply@blogger.com (Jo Wadsworth) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:39:00 +0000

It's meant to be silly season, but this is one of the most challenging news weeks I can remember at the Advertiser - and not for lack of stories.

I can't go into too much detail at the moment, but we have a story (and no, it's not the murder) which has made everyone in the senior editorial team determined to do their very best to make it fly.

I should start by saying the story is all down to reporter Aline Nassif - and it's all credit to her drive and inspiration that we're all pulling together in the most effective way I think we have ever done.

I've said before it's no secret there are quite significant differences in our attitude to web-first in the newsroom. And there's no doubt the fact there was no question of this ever being broken first online (it's not that kind of story) has meant we've been able to concentrate on how to do it the most justice we can once it does get there.

The skills both I and chief photographer David Berman have been busy building up over the past weeks and months are now going to be tested pretty much to their full. I really hope we rise to the challenge.

Even if we only manage to pull off what we've planned so far, it will easily be the most impressive multimedia project we've done. But in the afternoon breather we have after Thursday lunchtime's print deadline, I'm determined to make it even better (by which I mean more interactive).

It's almost undoubtedly going to be one of the Advertiser's biggest stories of the year in print. Until now, we've not had the skills, the technology or the time to cover those big stories in the same way online. This is our chance to change that - and prove our website can eventually overtake the paper in terms of presenting Croydon's stories in all their complexity.

Oh, and if anyone has any examples of ways papers have presented multimedia packages we could aspire to (especially ones with lots of interactivity), I'd really appreciate it if you could post them below.