BBC announce new web plan

Members of the regional press have slammed the BBC’s plans to launch a network of 60 ultra-local websites.

The UK Press Gazzete has revealed the BBC hope to create a raft of new sites using the latest “online localisation and mapping technology”.

In October last year the BBC dropped their plans to broadcast ultra-local TV following pressure from regional newspapers.

The problem that people in the regional press have with the BBC is that they can’t compete with them on a level playing field.

It’s no secret that when the BBC do something, they do it very well – and this is because they have the expertise and the revenue to invest.

If they were a commercial company this wouldn’t be a problem – fair play to them.

But they’re not - they are publicly funded, through the license fee, and they don’t have to take commercial issues into consideration.

This means that the BBC doesn’t have to compete with the regional press for advertising or anything like that, but unfortunately we have to compete against them.

If people are getting their fill of news from the BBC, in whatever media used, they will not need to come to us: our circulations, or web visitors, will drop - inevitably followed by our advertising revenues.

In the past one of the only advantages regional newspapers had over the BBC was that they covered their local area in far more detail.

But now it seems the BBC want to flex their considerable muscles here too.

Should they be allowed to do this?

Personally I don’t think so.

I don’t mind if any of the big guns like Sky or ITV want to turn their sights on the hyper-local side of the business - at least they will be doing it to make money.

This means they risk falling foul of all the same pitfalls and problems that the rest of us already have and will only have limited resources to throw at any project.

I think if the BBC is allowed to go ahead with their website plans it will inevitably hit local newspapers and local newspaper websites – and hit them hard.

So hard that it may even mean the end for some.

It will only be then that readers, and many people in the industry itself, understand that regional newspapers are unfortunately not a service - like the publicly funded BBC – but a business.

And any business can only exist if they are making money.

http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=1&storycode=40081&c=1

Sky News breaks first

Yet again Sky News demonstrated just how the internet should be used to break a story.

At around 1.30pm today, January 15, Sky News’ Breaking News section stated that two anti-whaling activists were being held ‘hostage’ after boarding a Japanese ship.

The story consisted of one grainy picture and less than two paragraphs of text.

Most sites such as the BBC had, to the best of my knowledge, no reference to the story at all.

Within just half an hour Sky had updated their story three times, adding more detail, colour, background information and pictures.

A few hours later there was a full picture story.

Being able to build on a story quickly like this is the biggest advantage of the internet – especially for a newspaper website.

Broadcasters have always been able to use their mediums of television or radio to keep a story rolling, but newspapers have only ever been able to print the story as they knew it, up to the time of going to press.

Now though they can compete for people’s interest in news via the web - they can develop a story just as quickly as anybody else.

And Sky News show how this should be done.

Editors shouldn’t be afraid of going with a story: as long as all the normal, basic checks are done.

But every detail is not needed before something is published online – these can be added as and when they come in., just like the whaling story on Sky.

However, some news organisations still appear to be too restrained: waiting until they have all the information before publishing online – but nowadays that can mean the story is hours old and has already been published on dozens of official and unofficial news websites.

Of course this doesn’t mean that traditional standards and legal issues should be forgotten; far from it - they just need to be carefully adapted to the changing digital environment.

An ex-mayor, 42DD breasts, Fark and Fox News

Seeing a spike in your website’s traffic is very satisfying, especially if you’ve managed to engineer part of it yourself.

I’ve found the news aggregating site http://www.fark.com/ is one of the best ways to do this.

Just about every news organisation in the world, including BBC, The New York Times, Sky, The Sun etc, send their unusual and quirky stories to Fark – in the hope that the site’s editors will choose their stories to appear on the homepage of http://www.fark.com/.

Only around 50 a day make it, but as each story is linked back to the original website the rewards - in terms of increased traffic – can be immense.

Within five minutes of getting our last story on Fark 2,000 people were directed back to our site - 24 hours later our story had over 60,000 views and nearly 200 Fark comments.
A pretty impressive spike for any set of page impression statistics.

Another advantage of Fark is that other sites pick up on the story and link back to the original site.
Our story has now been picked up by Fox News (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,321392,00.html) and appears on their site - so the visitor count continues to rise.

Some digital editors still seem reluctant to get their stories picked up external sites, especially if the only visitors they are likely to attract will not live in their newspaper’s patch.
But this shows a lack of understanding for how the web can, and should, be used – as well as a little naiveté. After all would print editors object if they suddenly received a request for 60,000 copies of their newspaper from America?

By the way, the story that got picked up Fark this time was this one:
http://www.eveningleader.co.uk/news/Women-cant-resist-squeezing-former.3653030.jp

And the title I gave it for the Fark editors was:
“Women can't resist squeezing former town mayor's 42DD breasts. "I don't know why he's complaining, he loves it really," says his friend. Yes, there's a picture”

Who couldn’t resist reading more?