Letter in The Times

Following a story this week in The Times by Sathnam Sanghera about why businesses shouldn’t use Twitter I decided to dust the old pen off and compose a letter in response. Sathnam made some very valid points but I felt he had been slightly short sighted in his analysis of the situation. Someone else must have liked my argument at The Times, as yesterday my response appeared in the hard copy of the paper.

I’m a firm believer that you have to prove to people you can do something yourself before they will buy into you providing them a similar service. Would you pay a company that doesn’t blog to provide you advice on how to manage this communication channel? The same goes for rapid response campaigns. We have countless examples at Berkeley PR of running rapid response campaigns for our clients which work on the same principals used to secure coverage such as the above letter in The Times.

 

A year in print

Via Matt Buck’s blog I found this cool video created by Will Sturgeon. Be warned it is not pleasant viewing for those involved in the newspaper business but helps demonstrate why the industry is changing so much and hopefully helps you appreciate the pressures journalists must be under these days.

National newspapers are booming online

Source: Guardian

UK national newspapers are booming online according to the latest official figures published by ABCe. Even though advertising and circulation figures are generally falling, figures for online editions of the national newspapers all showed a jump in traffic.

Leading the way was the Guardian.co.uk site, which fell just short of 30 million different users during the month of January. Jemima Kiss attributed this soar in figures to events such as Obama’s inauguration, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and the ongoing economic downturn that marked the beginning of the year.

Next up was The Telegraph with a 110% growth in traffic from January 2008 resulting in almost 26 million unique visitors. The Times and Sunday Times website just overtook the Mail to reach third place, with almost 23 million unique viewers.

Great news in an industry which seems to be dogged with bad news recently of job cuts and closures. I suppose the million dollar question is how the papers will be able to monitise this growing online audience?

Daily Mail get in the Christmas spirit

Source: allchristmas.co.uk

You just have to love the Daily Mail, talk about getting into the Christmas spirit. Check out this headline and story……Robin redbreasts may be symbols of Christmas but are bloodthirsty killers. You couldn’t make it up!

Independent Minds

Source: Independent Minds

I have just seen that the Independent has launched a blogging platform for the newpaper’s journalists and readers called Independent Minds, using the LiveJournal blogging platform. The blog has been set up to display content from Independent journalists, where they blog about their stories, highlight their pet projects and engage directly with Independent readers. It is also possible to have your own blog on Independent Minds and air your opinions among likeminded users.

This coincides with the re-launched website and the papers bid to step up their web pages and online features.

UK national newspaper update

Source: FT site

According to a piece on Journalism.co.uk, the Financial Times is set to boost its online video content with a focus on breaking news coverage and footage produced by reporters.

Head of video at FT, Richard Edgar explained there are no plans to use user-generated video or footage from external sites, the FT plans to retain high editorial control of content.  However, he did note that FT is experimenting with live video streams where readers can submit comments or questions. 

Moving to The Independent, we see a launch of a 24-page sports section replacing the stand-alone media section which has now been moved into the main paper but still has seven pages of coverage.

Last but not least, The Times Online has decided to restructure their editorial team and will no longer have the position of Editor-in-Chief Online.  The previous editor-in-chief, Anne Spackman, will now be the comments editor.  I wonder how happy she is about that one?