Guardian Crowdsources Plinth Project

Readers are being asked to help the Guardian capture every moment of the Fourth Plinth project in Trafalgar Square.

Designed by Antony Gormley, the public artwork will see human statues take to the plinth every hour for the next 100 days.

Photographic coverage of such an event represents a “massive undertaking”, said the Guardian, and therefore crowdsourcing is the newspaper’s chosen method for tackling it.

A Flickr group - Plinth Watch 2009 - has been created so users can post their pictures alongside those taken by Guardian photographers.



The editor’s picks of these readers’ pics will later be published on Guardian.co.uk and some could possibly be printed in the newspaper too.

Reporters have also set up a Twitter feed dedicated to updates about events on the plinth throughout the day.



In an article appealing for content, culture editor Alex Needham pointed out that the crowdsourcing approach reflects the spirit of the work itself.

Needham said: “One and Other is a work of art which will be created by the general public.

“It would be brilliantly apt if our coverage of it could be made in a similar spirit of mass participation.”

Showbiz Blog Sells For Over $10M

Entertainment news blog Deadline Hollywood Daily has been purchased in a deal estimated to be in excess of $10 million (£6.2m).

The 24-7 breaking news blog is written by established showbiz journalist Nikki Finke and is now owned by Mail.com Media Corporation.

According to the Guardian, newspapers have received tip-offs that the purchase price stands somewhere between $10m and $15m.



Breaking the news of the landmark deal on DHD, Finke assured loyal readers that the blog would retain its editorial independence.

“Know this: I did not sell out. I really meant it when I said that DeadlineHollywood Daily.com will continue to be an independent editorial voice – and I would retain complete control over everything reported on the website - so that DHD’s credibility with its readers could remain intact.”

She added that new infrastructure and resources means the site will now expand to cover east-coast entertainment news, with a New York-based reporter set to join the ranks soon.

Finke, who has worked for Newsweek and the LA Times among others, first wrote DHD as a column for LA Weekly before starting the website.

MPs' Scandal Adds 1m Users

Telegraph.co.uk’s exclusive coverage of MPs' expenses brought more than 1 million additional users to the site in May.

According to a report from the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the website boosted traffic by 1.4 million unique visitors compared to the previous month.



The expenses coverage also helped the Telegraph Media Group (TMG) improve its print circulation performance during May.

Plus, advertising revenue received a boost as a direct result of the newspaper’s expenses coverage, reports Forbes.

And it is likely that June’s figures will see impressive growth too with the publication of the unredacted data in a pullout special distributed with the Daily Telegraph.

A searchable database holding details of all the expenses claims then went live on Telegraph.co.uk towards the end of the month.

TMG’s digital editor, Edward Roussel, told the Guardian that the publisher’s exclusive and in-depth coverage of the scandal has been of interest to a global audience.

“Our MPs’ expenses coverage brought new audiences to our website, helping to extend the Telegraph brand in the UK and across the world.”

NPR Crowdsources Who’s Who Pic

The audience is helping American reporters identify political lobbyists from a series of photographs.

National Public Radio (NPR) decided to crowdsource the task after finding it hard to identify many of the people representing health lobby groups at a senate committee meeting.

Spokesperson Andrea Seabrook told Poynter Online that the photographs were taken with the original intention of enabling journalists to pick out faces.

However, when this only resulted in several identifications, the audience was called on to help.



“We’ve been watching various groups use crowdsourcing to mine and process data, and when it turned out to be harder than we’d originally thought to ID lobbyists ourselves, we thought we’d give it a shot,” said Seabrook.

She added: “We’re very glad we did. It seems to be making the story more interactive and engaging for our listeners, and we’ve already gotten quite a few great leads.”

The crowdsourcing effort forms part of NPR’s Dollar Politics series, which is looking at the impact of lobbying on US legislature with regards to healthcare, banking regulations and energy.

Pay-For-News Service Targets 10%

The team behind an online journalism content service believes it can get 10% of users to pay for news.

According to the Guardian, the founders of the soon-to-launch Journalism Online see such a significant percentage of paying users as an attainable goal.

Journalism Online is among a number of start-ups which will work in partnership with publishers to provide a paid content service.

Users will be given the option to subscribe to view all the content of participating websites or can sign up for content bundles and niche packages.

Journalism Online was founded by Court TV creator Steven Brill and Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz among others.

The service is scheduled to launch later this year.

Find out more about its paid content model and see its mission statement on the Journalism Online website.

Knight News Reveals Winners

The nine recipients of this year’s Knight News Challenge grants have been announced this month, reports Journalism.co.uk.

Over $5 million (£3 million) is to be shared among the winning projects, all of which seek to provide innovative ways for news and data to be shared with communities.

Among the successful bidders are an open platform document-sharing scheme and a project to develop data visualisation tools.

Receiving over $350,000 from the Knight News Challenge is MediaBugs, which plans to create a national website where readers can report journalistic inaccuracies published online or in print.

The brainchild of Salon.com co-founder Scott Rosenberg, MediaBugs hopes to promote transparency among reporters when it comes to admitting and fixing their errors.

Another recipient of a significant sum is a wiki project from New York’s Gotham Gazette.

The online news provider will use its $250,000 grant to fund the creation of a wiki dedicated to the law-makers at the city council.

Gotham Gazette is planning to use the wiki to inform citizens about local politics and share information about city legislators.

Mobile journalism is the focus of a winning bid from the co-founder of MobileActive.

A $200,000 grant will fund the organisation’s plans to create the downloadable Mobile Media Toolkit.

The toolkit will feature applications for video and audio as well as a function enabling content distribution on social networking sites.

A list of the nine winning projects is available on this pdf file.

The Knight News Challenge is a five-year contest to fund community-focused digital journalism projects.

Hyperlocal Platform Launched

Hyperlocal news specialist Outside.in has launched a neighbourhood news service for publishers.

Described by its creators as an “out-of-the-box hyperlocal news section”, Outside.in for Publishers (OIP) aggregates local news stories from a variety of sources.

Users can search for news by their area and then select articles and blog posts to read from the pins available on the map.



According to the Outside.in blog, the self-service platform enables publishers to create “hundreds or thousands of new high-quality pages for their site ... with targeted advertising inventory”.

The service has been taken up by a number of news providers in the US, including Counton2.com and Richmond.com.

OIP is not currently available to publishers in the UK, but an international rollout of the service is planned in the future.

Outside.in first launched in the UK in October 2008.

[HT – Journalism.co.uk]

Reporter Launches Bristol Site

A journalist is going it alone by launching his own website dedicated to news and events in Bristol.

Bristol 24-7 is the creation of Chris Brown, who took voluntary redundancy from the Western Daily Press earlier this year.



Speaking to Journalism.co.uk, Brown asserts that the site is a full-time commitment as he attempts to create the go-to news website for Bristolians with a mix of original and aggregated news.

The former Independent journalist also plans for the website to become the first online port of call for visitors to the city.

At the moment, Bristol 24-7 is a one-man show so Brown is editor, reporter, photographer and videographer – among other things.

However, he hopes that interaction with readers will provide him with fresh perspectives.

“What goes on the site will be determined by my skills as an editor,” he said.

“I'll either make the right or wrong calls, but hopefully readers will let me know soon enough what they think of my decisions and will suggest better stories on the day.”

And Brown believes that his one-man band operation has the requisite flexibility to become attuned to the needs of an online audience.

“I have believed since I came up with the idea that I can produce a better online newspaper than the traditional media groups; do it at a far lower cost; and develop it faster and more intuitively to the demands of the readers.”

As for revenue, Brown is seeking site sponsorship and will provide digital marketing services to interested parties.

“It’s not just the better value for money that digital marketing offers businesses now, it is the proactive approach which looks at exactly what a business wants to achieve and uses the new technology to make it happen that will rule the day.”

Find out more about Brown’s long-term ambitions for the site in his interviews with Journalism.co.uk and HoldtheFrontPage.co.uk.

ITV Ends Web News Contract

ITN’s web division will stop supplying news to ITV.com next month following the cancellation of the contract.

The Guardian cites sources suggesting the agreement was worth an estimated £500,000 to ITN On, which has provided text and video reports to the website.

Video bulletins covering global and national stories will be supplied in the future by the television news division of ITN.

Text articles published on ITV.com will come from ITV’s regional journalists.

A memo from ITN On managing director Nicholas Wheeler published on the Guardian website reveals that job losses are now inevitable.

He concludes: “The loss of this contract represents significant revenue hit for ITN On, and means that we have to review the online operation to see how we can best deliver text stories to our remaining online clients.”

Kent Paper Launching War Archive

Life in Kent during the Second World War is the focus of a new digital archive poised to go online this autumn.

From September, visitors to Kent Online will be able to view thousands of articles and photographs published by the Kent Messenger during the war.

According to HoldtheFrontPage.co.uk, the archive will also have advertisements from the time and a search function enabling users to search by dates, places and names.

“The KM’s war pages provide a first-hand account of every day life as well as the remarkable courage and tenacity of the people in Medway and Kent who endured so much for so long,” said Ron Green, managing editor of the KM Group.

Meanwhile, web users who fancy a read of something a little older should take a look at a new online newspaper archive from the British Library.



The British Newspapers 1800-1900 digital archive houses over two million pages from local and national newspapers published during the course of the century.

Find out more from the British Library website and on HoldtheFrontPage.co.uk.