April 25 2007

Six months into the Herald running its own website, and we were invited to attend a prestigious industry award-ceremony, not bad going - if I do say so myself. Now, there are several industry awards ceremonies each year, just like the film industry has its Oscars, Golden Globes, Baftas, TV Quick Awards etc etc.

So which of the newspaper industry gongs are the most prestigious? Hard to tell, everyone has their own opinion. One quick test is - the most prestigious awards are whichever ones you just been shortlisted for a prize in. The least prestigious are the ones you just walked away from empty handed, vowing never to enter again because 'it's all political'.
Fortunately for us, we swanned, or more staggered, out of the Hilton Park Lane with a commendation for thisisplymouth in the Most Innovative Technology category. Not the top prize, but like I say we've only been running the site for six months and we were beaten by the Financial Times, so I don't think there's any shame in that.
It was an eye opener, not just the £50 a bottle wine, the steak to die for and the best dessert ever created by man (an indescribable chocoalte souffle), but also the chance to talk with some of the other nominees. They included the Telegraph, the Guardian, the Mail on Sunday, some international newspapers and many, many more. Elite company.
Sitting next to me was the deputy editor for the BBC's world news website. We started comparing sites .They're coming up on their 10th annivesary...and have a team of 250 dedicated journalists.
I almost spat out £4.75's worth of Bordeaux at that point.
"You mean you share them with TV?" I managed.
"No, no, just for us..."
"And the radio?"
"No, just for the website
"And that includes all your production staff and technical team and coders?."
"No, just reporters."
"Huh!" was my considered response.
As I say, six months, but its good to know what we're up against. Taking the Herald forward online puts us in direct competition with people like the BBC's national and international news websites. The fact the judges would put us in the same room as leading national and international titles is more evidence of that, and of the fact that we are competing at the right level.
For example, at the time of the Iran captive crisis, people from across the world were logging on to thisisplymouth to discover the latest, as well as visiting sites like the BBC and Sky News.
The circulation of the Herald no longer stops at the River Looe in one direction and the River Dart in the other. Now at least 10 per cent of our online readers are outside the UK, and many more are in the Uk but outside the Herald's traditional heartland.
So how are we approaching this huge opportunity? What are we doing to make thisisplymouth the best site for the people of Plymouth and beyond?
Six months ago just a fraction of the Herald's content appeared online on thisisplymouth. Every day a few articles would be blasted along the cables to a small team of technicians outside the city who watched it flow into the site, checked it looked okay, pressed a key or two then went on to one of the other three-dozen sites they managed.
Okay, there may have been a little more to it than that, but you get the picture.
Since November we have been working hard to ensure all content goes online, and that we make the best use of it all. Which is why you can see new folders and sections for everything from our features content, reviews and previews and our motoring section to euchre results and American Football.
Every news story that appears in the Herald now appears online, and it appears earlier than before. Back then nothing appeared before 12pm, then you had to wait until 12pm the next day for more.
Now we start adding content in earnest at 7am, then we don't stop updating until 10pm. Any breaking news overnight will also prompt a dash to the nearest keyboard to make sure it hits your screens as soon as possible. People start commenting straight away by adding their thoughts to stories, sending in emails or joing the debate on our bulletin boards.
And its paying off. the figures show 250 per cent increases in traffic to our news and home pages, and a 450 per cent increase year on year in new visitors.
On top of that we also now offer you a host of online exclusive content, like this blog. We have well over a dozen bloggers writing on everything from Polish community and Islam to basketball and fishing. In the first six months you've read these pieces more than 20,000 times.
We've also added video, including footage generated by headmounted camera by Herald reporter and fellow blogger Tristan Nichols in Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and the Falklands.
Talking of the Falklands, I've been busy beavering away to update my programming skills, which were somewhere at the level of being able to write a version of Space Invaders for the Spectrum48, to take in HTML, Java, Javascript, ASP, JSP, CSS, MFI, B&Q and D.I.S.C.O. and we can now create minisites like the one holding all our content for the Falklands 25 commemoration at www.thisisplymouth.co.uk/falklands.
We've also built sites for Face of Plymouth 2007, the forthcoming election, last year's school nativities, the Royal Marines deployment to Afghanistan, Entrepreneurs Bootcamp, Gold Star and others - including Battle of the Bands 2007. This site, similar to the others, included picture slideshows, audio, video, a discussion board where the judges, bands and audience talked about the evenings before they happened, then disected them afterwards, band profiles, latest news and more. In its six weeks it drew in close to 20,000 hits.
During the last six months thisisplymouth has also been extensively redesigned. We've added online photosales so you can buy all Herald pictures online, we've added a new video section with our reporters trained in filmwork and we add audio files to some stories, like Ollie's latest rant or one of Martin Freeman's excellent interviews.
So are we happy to have come away with a commendation after a busy six months? Yes, very. But personally I'm even happier that we've added 4,000 new registered users to the site, boosted registered users on our bulletin board by a quarter and that the site has had well over six million page views in the last four months, because that means that we're providing what you - the users - want, and that is what it's really all about.
So any tips to those out there hoping to become a succesful web editor? When you find one, ask one!! The best advice I would give today is "If you've got to sit the first part of a nine hour exam in advanced web deign at 6pm in Paignton, try not to be drinking at an after-party in a bar in Soho at 2am that same day."

April 5 2007

Over 13 days it threatened to escalate into all out war. Hour by hour, minute by minute the language became more belligerent, more confrontational. At times it spilled over into an all-out us-and-them nationalistic furore.

Diplomatic efforts were made, perhaps the right word in the right place could bring it to a conclusion but, with the world watching, all seemed in vain.
I refer, of course, to the web chatter on thisisplymouth and other sites (yes there are other sites out there) following the capture of our sailors and Royal Marines by Iran.
For every comment posted on our site in response to a story, or on our bulletin board, offering support and messages of hope for the captives and their families here in Plymouth and elsewhere, there were two raging against the British war machine and the 'loonie Muslims'.
Thankfully those 'loonie Muslim' comments were few and far between on our site, but if you check out 'Batch's' page on bebo you will come across a few comments that would have Jim Davidson and Bernard Manning dialling the Racial Equality Council. Yes, okay, they got the geography wrong. And the spelling, the grammar, the history and the politics. But they were offensive none the less.
There was the odd comment on thisisplymouth which may, or may not, have been racist. In an age of political correctness gone mad, and an age when people can post their every thought with minimum effort or consideration, it falls to us to decide whether a comment is or could be perceived as being racist.
For example, one post refered to Mr Ahmadinejad as Mr Ahmedinnerjacket.
Is that racist? Possibly, probably. The writer almost certainly never meant it to be racist, simply ridiculing of a man who had ridiculed our service personnel. Certainly it has enough potential to be perceived as being racist that we decided to remove it.
But then again, Tony Blair is only ever refered to by our posters as Tony Bliar. Tudor Evans is only ever refered to as Toady. The Lib Dems are only ever the Limp Dims. Offensive certainly, but not racist.
Then again, as for comments on thisisplymouth raging against the war, you could hardly move for them.
In fact, when Mr Ahmadinejad started speaking about the folly of Western troops being in Iraq, and the evils of putting a woman and mother on the front line, I thought he was reading from the user comment section on thisisplymouth. No, seriously.
Few things get our online correspondents more riled than war. Being a naval city with a proud history of sending its sons to give a sound kicking to anyone who may have deserved it, or perhaps just looked at us a bit funny, there are many in Plymouth who treasure our military might and will happily expound the value of war for hours on end.
At the other end of the scale, we have have posting on our site some of the most aggressive pacificists that you could ever wish to meet. Trident, the Middle East, military budgets will all have them calling for the dismantling of the New World Order. "OR ELSE!!". Any excuse will find them posting an anti-war comment on a story.
Say, for example, we posted an online version of the Our Father. It wouldn't be long before we got a comment saying something like "Our Father, in old English that's Vaeter Unsere. Vaeter sounds a bit like Phaeton. Phaeton was a 38-gun-frigate which captured the Dutch in Nagasaki in 1808 and fired upon Japanese and Chinese vessels. YOU MUST DISARM NUCLEAR MISSILES NOW."
One post leads to another, soon it gets personal, and people say things online they would never say face to face, not just for fear of being punched but because the Internet grants us an assumed anonymity and also makes the person we are attacking anonymous.
Even the Falklands War commemoration section of the thisisplymouth bulletin board has attracted anti-war posts. People who would never in a million years think of vandalising a war memorial will happily 'vandalise' a virtual memorial by posting comments that veterans and relatives of the fallen will find offensive.
As more and more of us have access to the Internet and find new ways to express our views, it looks like we will have to learn all over again the rules of polite society, learning to respect the opinions and feelings of others not through fear but through compassion and understanding. While the Herald will continue to police all comments posted on any section of its site, as all responsible website owners do, there must come a time soon when we as users learn again to police ourselves.
If we want the Internet to remain a place free of censorship, we must learn to censor our own dark and hurtful thoughts rather than posting them 'in the wild' where they could do more damage than we could imagine, and certainly more than we would wish.