SocialMediaCamp London: How to write awesome Headlines (So People read your Stuff) by Tom Whitwell [Times Online]
Sunday, 5 October 2008, 16:44
Some notes on Tom Whitwell's presentation on SEO at Times Online
Wednesday, 7 May 2008, 13:16
Comments
The irony, of course, is that a "Ronseal headline" isn’t one.
The plural of anecdote is not data — even when it’s ‘crowdsourced’
Tuesday, 11 March 2008, 18:05
I really like what the Times does online, but I must say that Roy Greenslade’s analysis of today’s Times splash is right on the money.
It doesn’t take university-level stats to know that self-selecting samples cannot be extrapolated to populations. An online vote touted as “a new kind of interactive poll” is no different than the sort of phone-in vote that papers have run for years.
It’s a very clever way of creating a very big collection of anecdotes, but to call it a “poll”, interactive or not, is misleading.
My favourite bit (in the printed editon) was this: “The poll, which attracted 2,476 responses, is novel because it reflects not just hard statistical data, but people’s observations and anxieties about the state of the economy”.
Eh? “Hard statistical data”? Where? Methinks the “just” was superfluous.
Further down (in a tiny boxout at the foot of the jump on page 4) communities editor Tom Whitwell provides the disclaimer that should have been right up in paragraph two — the story “does not have the statistical rigour of an opinion poll”.
The Times isn’t the first newspaper to report its online votes as if they were some sort of survey, of course. But to sacrifice the intellectual rigour of a story for the sake of fostering online “community” or experimenting with “crowdsourcing” is a very strange set of journalistic priorities indeed.
I wonder how many letters will flood in tomorrow from the Royal Statistical Society and various OxBridge dons.
Newspapers use online audio and video to report on ‘anti-teen’ gadget’s noise
Wednesday, 13 February 2008, 11:23
National and regional newspaper websites have been using audio and video capabilities to good effect today in their coverage of the controversy over the “Mosquito” device, which uses a high-pitched sound audible only to young people in order to keep teenagers from congregating.
Monday, 11 February 2008, 22:42
Comments
"Wikipedia, the reader-written online encyclopaedia, which is bursting with false ?facts? and which is banned in a number of newsrooms, including that at The Times."
Monday, 11 February 2008, 22:42
Comments
"Wikipedia, the reader-written online encyclopaedia, which is bursting with false “facts” and which is banned in a number of newsrooms, including that at The Times."
Wednesday, 6 February 2008, 23:33
Comments
Not news, but worth repeating: "pithy, witty and provocative headlines–the pride of many an editor–are often useless and even counterproductive in getting the Web page ranked high in search engines."
Server strained? Push readers to blogs instead
Friday, 4 January 2008, 12:04
Times Online seemed to be experiencing a heavy load on its servers earlier this morning. But it also showed off an interesting solution to dealing with temporary downtime: Direct readers to an unaffected corner of the site — such as your blogs.
That’s what Times Online’s error message was doing this morning, when readers trying to [...]
Thursday, 8 November 2007, 17:57
Comments
A story I wrote gets Drudged…
Thursday, 8 November 2007, 15:06
Comments
"Times Online users will be able to give accounts of their travels from anywhere in the world, and read those posted by other readers. … using SpinVox."
@Society of Editors - ‘Google is highly dangerous’
Tuesday, 6 November 2007, 11:09
An organisation that produces no news at all is the third most trusted brand for delivering news, Phil Harding, notes from the floor, and asks the panel to respond. The answers suggest that the debates about the role of the seach engine have moved on about the relatively simple concerns about driving traffic versus the [...]
@Society of Editors - Football economics coming to online journalism salaries?
Tuesday, 6 November 2007, 10:14
The final session of the conference is “The Future is ours: 2020 Vision”, which is billed as “ifting the covers on editors’ crystal balls”.
Appropriately, the panel will be chaired by Martin Stanford, presenter of Sky.com News, the rolling news channel’s interactive programme which covers the most popular stories and debates on the web. He reveals [...]
New research on UK newspapers’ online business models
Thursday, 5 July 2007, 14:11
National newspapers’ online editors and managers are increasingly seeing print and online editions as complementary products, and at some titles concern about cannibalisation has “diminished to the stage where they are not a significant influence on strategy”.
These are among the key findings of newly-published research in the business models of national newspaper web sites by [...]
Oh, hai Telegraph editor. Can I has Nazi catz search traffik?
Thursday, 28 June 2007, 16:43
The new editor of Telegraph.co.uk, Marcus Warren, has been blogging for a week now.
Another feed to add to the newsreader, even if it has already had a post about cats that look like Hitler.
Despite its title, that post is actually very interesting. It seems a mole at Times Online has been supplying Victoria Place [...]
