How we built Ampp3d in eight weeks
…85% positive. What does worry the users? 1. They’d like more depth. We’re coming round to having to publish less content, and do it more in depth. Our initial idea of snackable data journalism where just a couple of numbers were enough to support a snappy 100 word story looks like it isn’t what the audience want from us. We’re now working harder on putting something a bit uniquely Ampp3d into every story. 2. Some are concerned about bias. We come…
#GamerGate poll: Clarifying the change from “Uncovering corruption” to “Fighting corruption”
…pro-GG vote until you edit manually! pic.twitter.com/5FIuTO7Dlp — Scott Malcomson (@RoyCalbeck) October 3, 2014 The suggestion being hinted at there was that I had deliberately done that to stop #GamerGaters sharing their vote. That wouldn’t be something I’d ever do. So I was faced with a choice of either editing the poll after it had been up for a while, or leaving pro-#GamerGate votes unshareable. Both of those options were sub-optimal. I decide…
Friday Reading S08E06
…ruck by this though, when he talked about the snobbish-ness that sometimes comes at you if your background is on the sport desk. “One thing I’ve often noticed is that television presenters whose background is in sport – and particularly local radio – are often the most competent at talking their way out of trouble when things go wrong on-air.” Having done some sport desk stints myself, it’s such an enjoyably curiously different beast to news, and…
Friday Reading S09E06
…a good job with its election coverage (43%) than a bad job (14%) Despite hundreds of thousands of pounds spent on social media advertising by political parties, only around one in seven (14%) of our survey respondents said they had seen one of these political ads online. Not a great week for media companies posting pictures of the wrong MP if they were a black woman. Here is a first hand account from Dawn Butler about what it felt like: “Google i…
“The who, what and why of UsVsTh3m” – Martin Belam at Hacks/Hackers London
…alls”. It recorded your personal best and made a satisfying “Ta-daaa!!!” sound when you completed the task, and proved to be horribly addictive. We very much enjoyed watching people taunt their friends over Twitter with the scores they’d got. It gave us the chance to be meta about ourselves as well, as every raging internet success deserves a navel-gazing “how we made it” feature. We wrote “16 behind the scenes secrets about ‘Ed Balls Teaches Typi…
Hello, world (Slight return)
…I painstakingly reconstructed every word and URL. And even all the spammy comments. In fact, at one point, I’m fairly certain I had the biggest Apache redirect config in history. On reflection, it’s amazing how much spare time you had before you have kids. When I switched to MartinBelam.com, I froze currybet.net as it was, and started afresh, with a plan to gradually migrate over some “key posts”. I think I migrated two or three. This time? I wro…
“The digital place you love is gone” – Joe Sokohl at EuroIA
…became their “place”. Typically, as time has gone on, layer upon layer of complexity has been added to AOL and Facebook. It reminded me of the “Featuritis” curve slide by Carrie Buckingham and Erica Drecker that was doing the rounds on Twitter from another talk. As time passes, users go through an adoption curve of “This is new”, “Yes! I can do this”, “Woah, where did they put that thing?” to something like “Sweet Holy Jeebus I can’t even find ou…
“Every story starts with an audience of zero” – Jay Lauf of Quartz at news:rewired
…publisher of Quartz. “Every story starts with an audience of zero” – Jay Lauf Jay Lauf started by apologising for being the “business” side talking to a room full of journalists, but he needn’t have worried because his core message about Quartz was about putting good stories and good journalism at the heart of an operation. It is barely a year old, and qz.com is on course to average around 3.3million unique users a month. Jay Lauf’s question to t…
Did the Times of Israel say genocide was permissible? Spoiler: NO
…opinion of the Times Of Israel is like saying any newspaper with a post-moderation policy is racist/sexist/votes Ukip because of the comments left underneath their articles….
SEOing the death of Robin Williams isn’t evil. It’s the equivalent of shouting “READ ALL ABAHT IT”
…SEO is a misguided reaction. As I’ve said many times, there is no robot or computer in the world compelling people in news organisations to make decisions. All decisions about SEO are taken by humans. And all the decisions you take in a news organisation reflect your editorial values. “Buzzy” may have been a horrible phrase to use in an internal memo about the recent death of a star, but the reason those words and phrases are “buzzy” is not becaus…