Malcolm Coles » Guardian

Hugely embarrassing: Daily Mail jumps gun on “Amanda Knox guilty” story

Malcolm Coles — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 19:47:28 +0000

I'm not sure it gets more embarrassing than this for a news site. In their attempt to be first with the verdict on Amanda Knox, the Mail Online published its pre-written story the moment the judge said the word guilty (no doubt for SEO reasons).

Unfortunately, like many people, the Mail was caught out by the judge finding her guilty of slander - before clearing her of the murder. At the sound of the word "guilty", they hit publish on a story about her appeal being rejected that includes reactions from the family and prosecutors being delighted - reactions that can't have happened as she was found NOT guilty of murder.

But she wasn't guilty ...

The Sun did it too I later discovered.

It's the Sun wot run it

Anyway, here's the story from the Mail's site:

Mail story

And some quotes:

"Amanda Knox looked stunned this evening after she dramatically lost her prison appeal against her murder conviction. ...

As Knox realized the enormity of what judge Hellman was saying she sank into her chair sobbing uncontrollably while her family and friends hugged each other in tears.

A few feet away Meredith's mother Arline, her sister Stephanie and brother Lyle, who had flown in especially for the verdict remained expressionless, staring straight ahead, glancing over just once at the distraught Knox family.

Prosecutors were delighted with the verdict and said that 'justice has been done' although they said on a 'human factor it was sad two young people would be spending years in jail'.

Following the verdict Knox and Sollecito were taken out of court escorted by prison guards and into a waiting van which took her back to her cell at Capanne jail near Perugia and him to Terni jail, 60 miles away.

Both will be put on a suicide watch for the next few days as psychological assessments are made on each of them but this is usual practice for long term prisoners."

And here they are publishing the right story a bit later.

So which is it?!?

And here are the Sun's two stories ...

The Sun's two stories

Embarrassing. (To be fair, Sky News and the Guardian also claimed she'd been found guilty - just not quite in so much detail ...!)

Google gives big sites a free pass on author profile pictures

Malcolm Coles — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 08:37:08 +0000

These aren't what you think

Notice anything odd about these two web results? They've got Google's new author profile pictures in, right?

How you normally make those photos appear

Well, no. Normal websites have to go through a slightly complicated process to get photos of the author of a page showing up in Google's web results (the old process, the new process). This basically involves cross linking your Google profile and either the page in question or to an "author page" that the page in question also links to.

There's a "by Malcolm Coles" link next to the photo

But when you do that, Google's results show not just a photo - but also a link to your Google profile.

And this link to the Google profile is missing from the screenshot above (but you can see it in the picture here).

So what's going on?

It turns out that those two web results from the Guardian aren't showing photos because of Google's normal process for making them appear.

There are no links from the author profiles on the Guardian to the journalist's Google profiles. And their Google profiles don't link to their author pages. (Here is Charles Arthur's author page on the Guardian and his Google profile. Here is Jemima Kiss's author page on the Guardian and her Google profile.)

However, both those author pages link to the journalist's twitter accounts - as do their Google profiles. And it appears that Google has decided that on the basis of this, it can presume that the photo on their Twitter profile picture is a picture of the article's author - and is showing the photo.

I think we can assume that this isn't going to work for most sites ... Thanks to @yesiamben, @ysekand, @danbarker and @yoast for helping work all this out yesterday.

Online news isn’t turning journalists into sheep

Malcolm Coles — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 06:30:36 +0000

John Naughton wrote an Observer article at the weekend complaining that news websites such as Gawker "allow ratings to dictate content". And although he didn't say so in so many words, his targets are clearly SEO and site-analytics and real-time trend data.

I say he wrote it. It's mostly a restirring of an original source, an article in the Atlantic. But his main complaints are that journalists are turning into sheep, with the herd all charging in the same direction. I can't see anything different about how online news works compared to how newspapers work. Here's why.

Ewe don't have to follow the herd

His issues are as follows.

News organisations are writing about what their readers are interested in

"Market-driven news [means] news agendas that are driven not by some professional assessment of what's important and relevant, but by research into what viewers like and respond to."

There are five sorts of stories that news organisations can report on:

News they uncover themselves (scandals like MPs' expenses)
News that they and everyone else knows is going to happen (a sports event or a court hearing)
News that's sent to them (press releases)
News that someone else has uncovered (copying someone else's scoop)
News that wouldn't be news but for the fact that it's related to things people are interested in and actively searching for.

With any of these, I fail to see what's wrong with taking account of what viewers like and respond to. If you can't get interested anyone in your story, what's the point of writing it?

There are sites that only do (4) and (5). We tend to call them content farms and dislike them. A couple have made a success out of it. But as a long-term strategy, I wouldn't bet your business on it - you're at the mercy of Google's next algorithm update.

What's more, newspapers have always done this. They have an editorial line - it's based on what their readers expect. The fact that there are tools that make feedback more precise online, doesn't mean it's any different to what they get up to in print.

News organisations are writing about what their readers are interested in

"Somewhere in [online newsrooms'] fancy open-plan offices is a guy who is watching the second-by-second audience for every page on the site. He's the chap who knows what's "trending" now and if your stories aren't figuring then – depending on the editorial culture – you may eventually feel the heat of managerial disapproval.

Again, this surely applies in print as well. If you can't uncover or write about stories that are of interest to people, or make them sound interesting or compelling, you're not going to last long. There are tools that make it more obvious with online - but good.

Also, what's trending doesn't have to be a passive thing. You can shape the news agenda, you can drive interest in a topic by the quality of your journalism.

News organisations are writing about what their readers are interested in

AOL asks its journalists to consider "Traffic Potential ("How many page views will this content generate?"); Revenue/Profit ("What CPM [cost per thousand impressions, a measure of online advertising effectiveness] will this content earn?"); Turnaround Time ("How long will it take to produce?"); and finally Editorial Integrity ("Will this content conform to AOL's editorial standards?"). In that order."

I'm not really sure the order matters does it? But I'm struggling to see anything wrong with this as a set of questions. Newspapers are not a public good - they survive on the basis of the audience they deliver to advertisers (or not). Maybe journalists were never asked this as explicitly before - but is this really a bad thing?

To sum up

I'm not denying the pressure on journalists, the toll on news rooms caused by cost cutting or the dumbing down of the news agenda.

But none of this is caused by the measurement of online news per se - the new tools just give news organisations a more accurate way to measure what they've always done.

Photo credit.

A simple graph shows why the Guardian’s future does look bleak

Malcolm Coles — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 09:33:08 +0000

Dear the Guardian: Please let me give you more money. Sun commentator Kelvin MacKenzie predicts that the Guardian will cease publication within 10 years, claiming "circulation fell on Monday to an all-time low of 200,000".

One problem is the Guardian's successful digital services. I've bought the Guardian every day since the start of 1995. Last year I got an iPad and an iPhone. Although I paid £3.99 for the Guardian iPhone app, I now no longer buy the weekday paper. Ever. This graph shows how much money I have given the Guardian Monday to Friday for the last 16 years.

I've gone from paying £230 a year for weekday news to £4

The collapse in what I pay is because I read most of the news for the next day's newspaper on the Guardian website on my iPad the evening before. And I read anything new on my iPhone on the way to and from work. The newspaper has nothing in that I need.

As ever, there are a few caveats with this sort of data.

Weekday only

I've excluded the weekend papers which I still do buy (though only about half as often as I used to). Partly because I got bored trying to find the cover prices, and partly, I admit, because the graph wouldn't look so dramatic ...

Cover price history

The cover prices for the Guardian are hard to find but I think they are as follows (the dates are when it went up to the new price and it was 45p in 1995): 2001 50p, October 2002 55p, Autumn 2004 60p, January 2006 70p, September 2007 80p, Jan 2009 90p, Sept 2009 - £1.

The Guardian's share

The Guardian doesn't get all the cover price. The publisher noted back in 2007 that retailers receive 25% of the cover price of each weekday Guardian. It's worse than that when it comes to apps of course - it has to pay 30% to Apple.

Advertising revenue

The Guardian does of course get advertising revenue. According to one Guardian editor in 2004: "The basic cost of producing the Guardian every day is (of course) more than the cover price. No matter how many readers bought it, we would lose money, in fact an increasing amount of money, without ad revenue - unless we put the cover price up to what it really costs us to make the paper, which is somewhere north of £5 a copy."

Part of the reason I don't buy the paper is because I look at the website. I doubt that the Guardian can charge online advertisers a marginal price for each extra viewer that's higher than that it charges for each extra print reader. So I presume my switch from print to digital has cost it advertising revenue as well.

But even if they earned the same, it still doesn't make up for the loss in direct revenue that the graph shows as the website's free to access.

Please do something ...

I used to get the Guardian free as part of my first job as a researcher and a student. I've actually been reading it since about 1988.

So I hope it manages to do something about the graph. Given I used to spend £230 a year for my weekday news, I'd happily pay more than £4 a year for its iPhone app. That price point might be the first thing to examine.

How to bookmark a moving target: the latest minute-by-minute Guardian report

Malcolm Coles — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 06:30:18 +0000

Success! One of my New Year's resolutions for newspapers was for the Guardian to implement a short URL that always redirected to the latest minute by minute report - that way I could bookmark the short URL and I wouldn't always have to go via the Guardian's Football Minute by Minute tag page to find the page I want.

I don't want to go via here to get to where I want

(Saving that click and page load is important as when I'm at the Emirates it's really hard to get a connection on my mobile).

After Martin Belam had pointed me in the direction of Yahoo Pipes, which I utterly failed to get to grips with, and some relevant RSS feeds, I asked on Quora how I could do what I wanted. And Darren Levy gave me the answer - both a Yahoo Pipes method and some PHP I could implement directly:

$mylink= array();

$links = simplexml_load_file
('http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/football+tone/minutebyminute/rss');

foreach ($links->channel->item as $item)
{
$link = $item->link ;
$mylink = array(0=>$link);
break;
}

header( "Location: ".$mylink[0] ) ;

?>

I've saved that code at this URL: http://www.malcolmcoles.co.uk/guardian-mbm.php. So if you bookmark that (or just click it for now), whenever you open it you'll get automatically redirected to the latest minute by minute report from the Guardian.

I'd like to tell you how it works. Um, but I don't really know. It obviously looks for the most recent URL and then location clearly does some sort of redirect.

Thanks to everyone involved. If you want to do something similar on a different subject (maybe cricket over by overs or the latest blogpost in a series or whatever) just replace the URL in the PHP. Here's more on the Guardian's tags and all the RSS feeds they can provide you with.

6 tiny New Year’s resolutions for newspapers

Malcolm Coles — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 07:00:29 +0000

Here are a few small changes I'd like to see newspaper websites make in 2011. If you could just get someone to sort these out, that would be great, thanks.

New Year's resolutions

Mirror: stop with the Tynt overkill

Tynt is the thing that, when you copy some text from a webpage, adds some extra text to what you copy (explanation - and in video form).

Newspapers usually use it to add read more and then the URL to whatever you copied. The Mirror adds a sodding advert to it. This makes something that's a bit annoying really annoying.

Look, this is what you end up with (I only selected the bit in quotes to copy):

“The intensity of the bruising and swelling would suggest a surgical procedure.”

Read more: http://www.mirror.co.uk/celebs/news/2011/01/04/gordon-ramsay-has-had-a-facelift-believe-experts-115875-22824883/#ixzz1A6oMDrBv

Go Camping for 95p! Vouchers collectable in the Daily and Sunday Mirror until 11th August . Click here for more information

Mail Online: fix your tweet button

Please fix the tweet button on your stories so that, when you click it, it adds the headline to the tweet box and not just a shortened URL.

Having to type the headline each time I want to share a Mail story is really annoying (especially as you use Tynt so you can't copy and paste the headline without then having to delete the URL).

Guardian: make it easier to find your minute by minutes

I enjoy the Guardian's minute-by-minute / clockwatch / over-by-over coverage of sports - I think they do it really well.

However, I often seem to want to access it on my mobile when I can't do so easily. Either because I'm in the middle of nowhere and mobile coverage is poor (as with my in-laws' house over Christmas trying to follow the Ashes) or because I'm at the Emirates and 60,000 other people are trying to use their mobiles at the same time.

Anyway, it would be cool if the Guardian set up a short URL - guardian.co.uk/clockwatch, say - that always redirected to the latest minute by minute page. That way I could bookmark that one URL and always go directly to what I want, without having to go via the sports category page first.

Guardian: speed up your mobile site

On the subject of the Guardian's minute-by-minute reports, the mobile site version always seems to be 10 minutes behind the full web version.

I've noticed this with the cricket and football live coverage lately. I don't know if it's a caching problem somewhere - maybe even out of the Guardian's control.

But if someone could fix it, please. I can't bear to use the mobile site (which I like) knowing that if I switched to the web version it's much more up to date.

Times: make your mind up with the paywall

I've been enjoying the Times coverage of the Ashes - that's because I've been reading it online for free. Mwah hah hah.

If you take a URL like, say, http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/sport/cricket/article2861947.ece and try to get there, you hit the paywall.

Replace "sport" in the URL with "public" and you can read the cricket content for free: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/public/cricket/article2861947.ece.

I don't really know why they do this but it seems a bit odd. Only works with the cricket stories, sadly ... But they should stop it - or advertise it.

Mirror: Buy the online rights to photos

When I look at some mirror.co.uk stories in the morning they say "See the picture in today's Daily Mirror newspaper". Sometimes (as with this story) later in the day the picture is added.

Read the paper to see the picture

This really annoys me and makes me not want to click on your stories in the morning.

Image credit.

Is RSS dead? Newspaper subscriber numbers now and 18 months ago compared

Malcolm Coles — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 11:32:51 +0000

There have been a couple of articles recently (see below) proclaiming the slow death of RSS as a way for users to subscribe to websites. So how do the number of subscribers to newspaper RSS feeds compare?

Back in June 2009, I somewhat rashly suggested that newspapers should turn off their RSS feeds as no one was using them (I then recanted slightly). Fortunately this means I have the data for back then on the number of people using Google Reader to subscribe to the three most popular RSS feeds for each UK newspaper.

So here's a table that compares the number of subscribers in Google Reader to each paper's most popular RSS feed 18 months ago and today - the overall fall is 68%.

Newspaper	June 2009 subscribers	January 2011 subscribers
Guardian	144,724	37,645
FT	96,819	33,173
Times	17,603	462
Telegraph	8,299	6,961
Independent	7,669	4,391
Sun	5,348	1,811
Mail	1,424	5,016
Mirror	716	1,367
Express	289	438

The papers with large numbers of subscribers have seen significant drop offs. A couple have seen an increase (but from a very low base).

Some caveats:

The search function in Google Reader can be a bit flaky sometimes, but I think I've found the top feeds in each case (although the feed with the most subscribers isn't always the same now as it was then).
The number of people using Google Reader will have changed in the intervening 18 months - but I'm not aware of any figures which show that its market share has drastically fallen.
The Times's numbers have obviously been affected by it going behind a paywall.

If you want to explore the data from June 2009, feel free. If you have any time, maybe you could work out the top three feeds now and compare them?

The debate was started by this post on whether RSS is dying (with a lively debate on Hacker News). TechCrunch reached the same conclusion separately. The truth is probably closest to this thoughtful follow up which distinguishes RSS as a mainstream browser-based user-facing service from a behind-the-scenes format. < Update I think that. I'm not saying RSS is dead. Don't flame me!

Google’s reading level scores for UK newspapers

Malcolm Coles — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 14:45:14 +0000

Google's launched a new feature that analyzes reading level scores for websites. Here are the scores for national UK newspapers, plus the overall verdict Google gives on the site's reading level.

There's no right score - it depends on the audience, of course. These are ordered by basic score - the order's fairly surprising (though that may say more about Google's scores ...)