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Professional newsrooms hold the key to your website success

17th June 2011 |

Here is the news: the BBC website is very popular; so too is the Daily Telegraph, CNN and The Sun. Indeed, all of the news organisations have thriving websites. In fact, The Guardian “newspaper” website is one of the most popular video watching sites in the world. Their “newspaper” newsroom has TV studios in it so that reporters can go and produce a video clip for the website on the story they have produced for the printed newspaper. The Guardian is not alone – other “newspapers” also produce multimedia content for online consumption. The Guardian now gets more people watching its online videos than ever bought their newspaper.

BBC NewsOf course, many people reckoned that the opening up of the web would take control and power away from big media corporations. The notion was that we would all be free to report news, to write features and to afford the world greater communications transparency. And indeed, to some extent that has happened. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter – they have all allowed us to be our own “reporters” and to get information published without having to go through the media mogul gatekeepers.

However, new research shows that the truly successful news delivery sites online are those which are run by professional news organisations. The study found that within the local news sector, only the websites produced by professional newsrooms are really successful.

The key question here is: why? Why, with all the “user generated content” currently available is it that professional news organisations are winning the war for eyeballs?

The reason is simple – they treat online media as though it were a publishing project. And guess what? A website is a publishing project. The reason so many business websites fail to achieve the objectives of the owners is because they treat websites as a design project, not a publishing one.

Interestingly, I’m speaking today at a Social Media Conference where the panel discussion before lunch revealed that the most successful blogs are those where time is spent on headline writing, picture selection and other publishing tasks. In other words, bloggers that have editorial calendars, who spend more time on writing headlines than on the text and consider how their readers will react are the ones making money and gaining most traffic.

It all points to the fact that if you want your business website to succeed, you need to run it as though it were a publishing operation.

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Categories: Internet Psychology, Online Business, User Generated Content
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User generated content set to take on huge importance

28th January 2009 |

We already know that many Internet users contribute content to the web. Take YouTube, for instance, which reportedly has around 15 hours of video uploaded to it every minute…! Not all of that video is professionally produced, business material. Most is what we’d call “user generated content”.

Already, just over 40% of all web users actually contribute to the Internet. Interestingly, around six out of ten people who use the web actually read or watch user generated content. As ever, there are more consumers than producers.

Even so, the numbers are steadily growing on both sides of the equation. By the time we get to the London Olympics over half the web will be produced by users, with almost three quarters of surfers using the stuff.

What does it all mean? It suggests that being able to contribute, to take part, to add to web sites, to udpate them, to be involved is going to become ever more prevalent and seen as a “requirement”. In other words, the days of the static, no-user-input, web page is gone – forever.

If you run any kind of online business, or use the Internet to promote an offline business, you will need to have the option for users to generate content on your site. If you don’t, you will be seen as rather abnormal and certainly behind the times.

And if you don’t know where to start, begin with a blog and allow people to comment. But whatever you do, do something to allow your users to generate content for your site. Your competition will.


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So we need an editorial process on the Internet after all..!

27th January 2009 |

My phone rang yesterday with a client curious about how the world knew about the Hudson River air crash before any news channels were carrying the story. Twitter, instant messaging, SMS, blogs – they all played their part.

But for the traditional news media they simply couldn’t run the story without first checking. After all, they’d look pretty dumb if it was some kind of hoax. Indeed, news outlets of all kinds have been duped by what seemed like real stories, when in fact they turned out to be false. The “Hitler Diaries” fooled two major publications, Germany’s Der Stern and The Sunday Times in the UK. So, journalists are careful about checking facts and “standing up” the story before they commit themselves to print, or to broadcasting something.

The Internet was the first with the news of the plane crash last week and that’s something the traditional media do not like. But their editorial processes, which take time, are there for a reason; to check the story and make sure no-one is trying to mislead.

Shame then that Wikipedia doesn’t have an editorial process. According to Wikipedia’s entry on Senator Ted Kennedy, he is dead. He may be unwell at the moment – but not that unwell. Wikipedia and its “editing community” are highly defensive of their “anyone can edit” policy. But things could change.

Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, has issued a suggestion that an editorial policy should be put in place to prevent the likes of the Ted Kennedy error from appearing. This has caused uproar.

Yet, the very people complaining about the infringement of everyone’s “right” to edit and contribute would be the very ones, probably, who would also complain about errors. An editorial policy may mean that things appear online rather more slowly, but it would mean that the facts are checked.

And that would help all of us. Trust in what is published online is low. We could all help improve that trust by establishing some kind of editorial policy for our own web sites, blogs and online writing. Perhaps we just have to start accepting a slower world for the sake of accuracy.


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User-generated content wins at Google

19th December 2006 |

Google has just published it’s list of the most searched terms for 2006. Seven out of the top ten are for user-generated sites. That tells us that most people are searching for sites where they can contribute – not just read. Your web site users want to take part – let them….! (By the way you can add your comments below….!)


Categories: User Generated Content

More evidence on value of user-generated content

21st November 2006 |

As if the power of Google, MySpace and other big players isn’t enough to convince you of the need for user-generated content, consider a report in this week’s New Media Age magazine. A report on page 6 is headlined News International seeks user content for new free-paper site. The story goes on to report the fact that The London Paper is focusing on user-generated content for its online edition. According to the paper’s online editor, James Law, they want to steer away from merely repeating the content of the printed newspaper. User-generated content allows them to do just that.


Categories: User Generated Content

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