Anna Doble, social media producer at Channel 4 News and a site editor for channel4.com/news. She will be on the panel for the liveblogging session at news:rewired. Here she talks about Channel 4 News’ approach to liveblogging and social media.

Liveblogging is enhancing the journalistic process at Channel 4 News. “Rewriting” might suggest the liveblog format is replacing other content. It isn’t. It adds value to the work of our correspondents, both on the TV programme and online.

The core values of Channel 4 News remain the same. We make news for people that want to know “why?”. We are committed to challenging expectations and we like to add a touch of mischief. Our programme goes out at 7pm, so the liveblog format means we can break news and engage viewers throughout the day, in the run-up to the show. And liveblogs – plus social media in general – enable us to treat our audience as a resource as well as a consumer.

We stepped up our social media presence ahead of the 2010 general election with the goal of creating more meaningful interaction between viewers and correspondents. Social media is a fantastic fit for Channel 4 News for two key reasons. Firstly, we know our viewers want more than a quick news hit – they like analysis, commentary, discussion around news – and social media provides a forum for that. Secondly, our onscreen team have very distinct personalities – recognition of Jon Snow and Krishnan Guru-Murthy in particular is actually disproportionate compared to other news programmes. Because of this, and because we allow those characters to come through in the programme, it means people want to engage with them beyond the 7pm bulletin. Whether that is asking Jon about his tie, or asking Krishnan which are the best new iPad apps, our viewers have an access point.

Jon Snow launched his Twitter profile for the election and, along with Krishnan, he now acts as a social media “hub” for our many accounts – from @channel4news to @FactCheck. We also redesigned our website to make it more social media-centric. The correspondent blogs physically frame the homepage and readers can post comments on Twitter of Facebook directly from the site. We wanted our website to act like a community in its own right – and pulling in live blogs and feeds from social media mean the site always contains up-to-the minute reaction in real time.

We’re working on integrating more video into the blogs – not just the polished packages that go out in the programme, but newsroom vlogs and on-the-spot analysis. A good example is our Budget liveblog which contained newsroom video inserts from Economics Editor Faisal Islam and Business Correspondent Siobhan Kennedy.

We have worked hard to get all of our correspondents and reporters onto social media platforms. Their individual areas of knowledge and skill feed into our news meetings and we hope this sense of “ideas exchange” is replicated to the wider audience via social media. We advise journalists to be themselves, mixing their own journalism with observations about the big issues of the day.

We know that the key to engaging audiences through social media is authenticity, so we’ve never “approved” tweets before publication – or enforced strict rules. Obviously, it is important that we protect our reputation for impartial, independent journalism – so we have a common sense policy which amounts to “if you wouldn’t say it on air, don’t say it online”.

Image by by Martin on Flickr. Some rights reserved.

A guest post from news:rewired speaker and SEO and content strategy consultant Malcolm Coles

When national news organisations like the Mail or the BBC take an interest in your specialism, they can siphon off all your search traffic. All of a sudden, you go from being the number one result on Google for a given search term to being buried under a mass of news stories from the mainstream media.

In my last post here I talked about how you should make sure your site is put together in the right way for search engines – that’s a key first step in getting SEO traffic. In the SEO session on the day, I talked about three tactics that celebrity gossip site Holy Moly uses on a day to day basis to help it compete against all of the other sites offering news about celebs.

Know what people are searching for
The first key tactic is to understand how people are searching. There are lots of ways to work out what people are searching for right now – although Yahoo announced the death of one of those, Yahoo Buzz, on the day of news:rewired itself!

So by using Google Autocomplete to work out that people were searching for “Leslie Nielsen quotes” the day of the actor’s death, Holy Moly used that as the angle for its story. It was the number one result for three hours for that search, and got 5,000 viewers – all from just a few seconds’ digging about.

Work out when and how people search
Another key tactic is to work out when people search. If you know an event is coming, you can use your own analytics data and tools like Google Insight to understand how people search in the run up to an event, during it, and afterwards. Holy Moly looks at this data to work out when and what to write about reality TV shows, for instance.

This graph shows search engine traffic to the site for searches on Karen Gillan’s underwear. The searches coincide almost exactly with when Doctor Who was on TV. What’s more, the individual spikes are Saturdays and Sundays – when Doctor Who is broadcast. Data like this means Holy Moly understands it’s worth writing about Karen Gillan in the runup to weekends when Doctor Who is on, and not any other time. Which is probably why, with the Doctor Who Xmas special on its way next week, their latest Karen Gillan underwear story has just gone live…

Look after your searched for pages
Once you’ve got a page that gets you lots of search traffic, make sure you look after it. With news sites, it’s easy for stories to move deeper and deeper into date based archives until eventually search engines forget all about them.

So if you have a page that gets lots of search traffic, keep linking to it from new relevant news stories. That way you can keep reminding search engines that it exists and that it’s important.

Another problem can be search engines showing the “wrong” page. For instance, Holy Moly has an old page about Karen’s underwear that appears top of the search results. There are similar issues with Holy Moly’s stories from previous years’ reality TV shows turning up when people search as opposed to the current years’ pages (or Big Brother pages showing up when people search for Celebrity Big Brother).

When this happens, you should go to the “wrong” page and insert a link to what you think the “right” page is – and also make sure you find ways to link to the newer “right” page from other stories you write. The more you do this, the more you signal to the search engines that the newer page is a better result when people are searching.

If you need any advice about SEO and your own site, feel free to contact me on Twitter or at my content strategy and SEO blog.

In the run up to news:rewired – beynd the story we’ll be posting some thoughts from our speakers on the topic of their session. In this post, Media Wales’ online communities editor Ed Walker discusses the growing importance of communities and what media organisations can learn from supermarkets.

Ed’s session:

Building a community from scratch

• How to engage online users and readers with new products, websites and verticals. A back-to-basics guide looking at how to start building an online community, with lessons from those who’ve been there, done it, and crowdsourced the T-shirt.
  

With: Ed Walker, online communities editor, Media Wales; Anthony Thornton, group digital editor, IPC Inspire Men & Music; Neil Perkin, founder, Only Dead Fish.

With advertising revenue broadly in decline and paywalls far from a proven solution or suitable for everyone, how important are communities to news outlets now and in the future?

Very important. Communities will still buy the paper, come back to the website time and again, send in stories/pictures and keep your media machine running. I don’t think it’s any accident that media who have built strong connections with their local communities are faring better than those who have lost ties. Communities may be the 10,000 loyal subscriber base you need to launch your new initiative. If you can build communities around locations and interests you’ll always be able to find advertisers who want to reach them.

What are some of the best examples you’ve seen so far of community building, and engaging online readers with other products, sites or verticals?

The Business Desk seems to be doing very well. They know their community and provide an excellent service for it. Bizarrely I think there’s a lot media organisations could learn from supermarkets, Sainsbury’s/Tesco with their Nectar/Clubcard schemes have created communities based around ‘the weekly shop’ and got us obsessed with trying to collect enough points to fly to Paris once after we’ve got 120,000 points. While these are very commercial examples, they show you can build a community on a huge scale. It’s also clever how they try to change people’s habits and get them to sample other products.

There’s some great stuff going on in media, and particularly social media in the States. The Palm Beach Post in Florida is doing some ace things with Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/palmbeachpost

In the run up to news:rewired we’ll be publishing some thoughts from our speakers on the subject of their session. Rory Brown is the co-founder of Briefing Media Ltd, a new business media company covering a range of niche vertical markets. The company’s first site is www.TheMediaBriefing.com which provides strategic intelligence and opinion for business-to-business, newspapers, consumer magazines, radio, TV, film, digital media, mobile and media finance.

Rick’s session:

Branding and entrepreneurialism

• How important is a brand to news organisations and can you teach a journalist to be entrepreneurial? What can journalists and communicators online learn from brands, start-ups and non-media businesses to make their work more successful?
  

With: Rory Brown, founder, Briefing Media; Alex Wood, digital consultant and founder, notonthewires; Rick Waghorn, founder, MyFootballWriter and Addiply; Molly Flatt, 1000heads

The media world is changing rapidly. From an impartial, faceless medium where consumers primary relationship was with a media brand; we are increasingly seeing those relationships become a lot more personal. Increasingly I follow individual journalists and commentators – regardless of where they write or broadcast – because I feel as though I have some form of relationship with them.

Search and social media have been the main drivers of this change and it is important that journalists understand this. You have to both develop a personal brand and also understand how to best make that brand ‘discoverable’. Think about what you stand for; what makes you different and how you want your relationship with readers to develop. Think about the ways in which readers or viewers consume information. Build personal networks and leverage those networks across multiple platforms.

For media startups the same lessons apply. Start with the reader in mind. What are their pain points? Where are they spending their time? How can you help them? What does your brand stand for?

When we launched TheMediaBriefing.com we began from the premise that readers didn’t have the time to trawl around multiple sources of information. They wanted a single place that they could go which pulled in the news that was most relevant to them. They wanted to be able to follow people, companies and topics of relevance to them and they wanted that mixed together with opinion from thought leaders in their industry. Our brand had to stand out from the crowd, have personality and embrace the social aspects of media.

There are lessons her for any media organisation – and also for individual journalists.

Follow this link to buy tickets for news:rewired – beyond the story.

In the final two weeks before news:rewired we’ll be publishing some thoughts from our speakers on the subject of their session. Rick Waghorn originally took his individual ‘brand’ to market in the shape of a stand alone football journalism site. Having built a potential network model in the shape of www.myfootballwriter.com, he launched three-click hyper-local advertising system www.addiply.com.

Rick’s session:

Branding and entrepreneurialism

• How important is a brand to news organisations and can you teach a journalist to be entrepreneurial? What can journalists and communicators online learn from brands, start-ups and non-media businesses to make their work more successful?
  

With: Rory Brown, founder, Briefing Media; Alex Wood, digital consultant and founder, notonthewires; Rick Waghorn, founder, MyFootballWriter and Addiply; Molly Flatt, 1000heads

When I launched www.rickwaghorn.co.uk in the summer of 2006, I thought journalist as ‘brand’ would prove to be the answer to all our woes; now – wiser for the experience – I’d suggest that journalist as a ‘network’ was more important; hence, in part, why rickwaghorn.co.uk morphed into MyFootballWriter a summer later.

As for teaching journalists to be more entreprenuerial, I think that has to start before they ever set foot in a newspaper office. It should start at the J-Schools, but doesn’t. There’s a lot of talk about teaching ‘entreprenuerialism’ to the kids, but very little evidence of it happening … despite the fact that in something like Addiply, we have an ideal ‘tool’ to re-skill the next generation of web publishers and journalists.

If anyone would care to look at where www.SR2blog.com took Josh Halliday this summer, perhaps they could start to ‘get’ the benefits of thinking outside the box; making your mark as an individual ‘brand’ and, above all, do-er.

Whether the incumbent organisations have the freedom of thought and action within their current structures to enable the likes of a Josh to demonstrate a *possible* way forward for us all remains a moot point; what was once our audience has long since gone. Whether we will ever catch up with them again is the challenge facing us all.

In the final two weeks before news:rewired we’ll be publishing some thoughts from our speakers on the subject of their session. We asked content strategy consultant Malcolm Coles whether online publishers should think beyond written content when it comes to SEO and about things like page design.

Malcolm’s session:

A: Search optimisation for business-to-business and specialist media

• Following on from news:rewired – the nouveau niche, how can journalists and publishers maximise the impact of their specialist material and news for search engines?

With: James Lowery, head of SEO, Latitude; Malcolm Coles, director, Digital Sparkle; Frank Gosch, global SEO lead, Microsoft.

When it comes to SEO, should online publishers be thinking beyond written content to things like page design?

Absolutely. I’m going to talk at news:rewired about day-to-day SEO tactics to compete with major news outlets, using Holy Moly, the celebrity gossip site, as an example.

But there’s a lot more to news SEO than just what you do day to day when creating content. Holy Moly recently recoded the entire site with the aim of speeding it up – and now page load times are just 40 per cent of what they were.

While they were about it, they fixed several other things that were causing problems with being picked up with Google News. Adam Sherk has put together a great list of Google News optimisation tips and we made sure we followed all of those.

For instance, the HTML code didn’t used to make it 100 per cent clear which was the main headline, and so Google News sometimes showed odd bits of copy from the pages instead of the headline (you can see some old examples of this problem at other sites here which I showed last time I spoke at news:rewired). You still see that with some sites today, as this screenshot of Google News today shows.

Also, Holy Moly uses a lot of images on most stories. You used to be able to click the main image and it would reload the page and show the next page in the gallery.

Google News sometimes shows thumbnail images taken from news stories in its results – but it (usually) won’t if the image used in your news story links to somewhere else.

So we removed the ability to click the main image to change it to the next one – and now we have thumbnails showing in Google News.

Here’s today’s story about OK! magazine – complete with thumnbail image taken from the story:

And here’s one about Wagner and benefit fraud:

After we’d made the changes to the code, Google News started showing thumbnail images overnight – so it shows how quickly Google can react when you “fix” something. In many ways, this change was a shame as it’s a tiny bit harder to move through the image galleries. But on the plus side, Holy Moly gets a lot more screen presence in Google News. (It does go to show that Google’s mantra of “Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines” is not always right. It would be easier for users if the main image was still clickable).

We still have the (very) occasional problem – Holy Moly spent ages putting together a page on this year’s I’m a Celebrity lineup and Google News didn’t pick it up. I thought it might have choked on the file size (with all the images) so we recreated it without them and it duly got indexed. We’d kind of missed the boat by then though …

I’ll be talking more about how to compete with national news publishers at News ReWired. So make sure you come to that session – there will also be lots about Doctor Who sidekick Karen Gillan and Harry Potter actress Emma Watson if you’re into that sort of thing … Unfortunately, there are also examples featuring Gillian McKeith, who I suspect might be less of a draw.

Follow this link to purchase tickets for news:rewired – beyond the story.

In the final two weeks before news:rewired we’ll be publishing some thoughts from our speakers on the subject of their session. Molly Flatt is word of mouth evangelist for 1000 Heads. She collaborates with consumers and researchers to produce insights into the psychology and behaviour behind word of mouth and social media, and how these can be transformed into effective long-term brand strategies for the likes of Nokia, Mars, STA Travel and P&G. We asked Molly Flatt about branding and entrepreneurialism for journalists working in a digital age.


Molly’s session:

Branding and entrepreneurialism

• How important is a brand to news organisations and can you teach a journalist to be entrepreneurial? What can journalists and communicators online learn from brands, start-ups and non-media businesses to make their work more successful?
  

With: Rory Brown, founder, Briefing Media; Alex Wood, digital consultant and founder, notonthewires; Rick Waghorn, founder, MyFootballWriter and Addiply; Molly Flatt, 1000heads

Social media gives people the opportunity to become brands? Ugh indeed. From Perez Hilton to those inexplicably furious serial commenters on newspaper blogs, many of us wish that it was less easy for plebs to become pundits in our citizen-centric age. But there’s a lower key, more meritocratic story also bubbling under here. The thought of branding yourself makes any self-respecting Bill-Hicks-loving media cynic shudder, but for those of us who have forged journalistic careers that would have been impossible five years ago, the ability to showcase your skills – and share them with people who might want to pay you – is genuinely unprecedented and transformational. Like many others, I blogged my way out of the unpublished/invisible deadlock, and I owe my entire tiny journalistic career to WordPress.

I still believe that there are few magic bullets to entrepreneurial success. Social media gave me the platform, but my content has spread or stagnated on its own merit (yes, that YouTube porn flick might have helped too, but hey, a woman can’t live on HTML alone). That dull pair Hard Work and Good Content still drive. But with more and more noise out there, an ability to heighten your social currency by stealing the strategies behind ‘branding’ while retaining an authentic, unbranded feel, is becoming increasingly important. And here we really can learn from the companies who are using word of mouth to engage with their audience in a direct, emotive way, without spam, sycophancy or a million-dollar logo rebrand. As anyone whose boss has seen them in a gimp mask on Facebook knows, our personal and professional lives are merging to an unprecedented degree, so ‘personal branding’ is becoming an instinctive and essential part of communication as we share our lives, our passions and our opinions publicly.

As Chris Brogan and Julien Smith put it in their book Trust Agents, “the whole web is one gigantic lever”, for individuals as much as brands. Whether this means employing ethics (such as transparency, honesty, accountability) social strategies (such as spending time emotionally connecting with the big players in your industry) or simple tactics (such as making everything you do shareable, conversational, and discoverable), there’s no shame in harnessing those details that will make you into – well, a more visible, more engaging version of you.

In the final two weeks before news:rewired we’ll be publishing some thoughts from our speakers on the subject of their session. We asked Frank Gosch, Global SEO Lead at Microsoft for MSN, about SEO and how it functions beyond the editorial effort.




Frank’s session:

A: Search optimisation for business-to-business and specialist media

• Following on from news:rewired – the nouveau niche, how can journalists and publishers maximise the impact of their specialist material and news for search engines?

With: James Lowery, head of SEO, Latitude; Malcolm Coles, director, Digital Sparkle; Frank Gosch, global SEO lead, Microsoft.

A successful SEO setup requires more than editorial effort.

There are six major areas that every site should work on in order to provide the best search performance:

1. Crawlability describes how easy or difficult it is for a crawler to access and index the content of a site. Features to improve crawlability are for example: robots.txt, XML sitemaps, redirection management, 404 handling, duplicate content issues, RSS management or rich media experience. A good crawlability is essential in order to get indexed by the search engines. Most of the features are supposed to be enabled by engineering but managed or requested by editorial/business.
2. On-page technical describes how SEO compliant is the actual source code of the pages is plus how much it enables editors to make editorial changes. This would for example include that development has to include a title tag but at the same time make it editable for an editor.
3. On-page editorial describes the content on the page. This includes the proper keyword research of editors and the right usage of the keywords in order to improve SEO compliance (e.g. usage of targeted keyword at the beginning of the title or keyword density).
4. Content Strategy describes what kind of content a site is actually publishing. Keyword research is part of this as well as to identify the right content for the targeted user group. On-page editorial should reflect the content strategy.
5. Internal link building includes the internal link structure of the site and the anchor texts that are used. Good internal link building will improve crawlability and user experience. Internal link building should be a 100 per cent in control of the publishers.
6. External link building is probably the most important tactic to improve SEO performance. At the same time it is the most time consuming one. There are various strategies to drive external link building and every site should identify what is the most appropriate way for them. In general you could say that a search engine policy compliant link building strategy will require more editorial and less development resources.

In order to perform well on SEO a website has to look into all of those mentioned points. The details vary from site to site and CMS to CMS. Some of those tactics are more in the influence of editorial, others are of engineering. However, there are certain best practices that should be followed by all site owners. It doesn’t make sense just to focus on one of the tactics. They are all depending on each other. A site can publish the greatest and most unique content but if search engines are not able to find it or to analyze it, it will hardly show up in the search results for the targeted keywords. A simplified view of it could look like this:

In the final two weeks before news:rewired we’ll be publishing some thoughts from our speakers on the subject of their session. We asked Guardian information architect Martin Belam about linked data and how it relates to his own work.

Martin’s session:

Linked data and the semantic web

• An introduction to linked data and the semantic web – what should you know and what benefits can linked data offer journalists? A session looking at where media on the web is headed and what skills future journalists and communicators will need.
  

With: Simon Rogers, datablog/datastore editor, the Guardian; Martin Moore, director, Media Standards Trust; Martin Belam, information architect, the Guardian; Silver Oliver, senior information architect, BBC.

Earlier this year I helped organise a summit featuring people from a lot of media companies, to discuss how linked open data collaboration between us might be of mutual benefit. At the time I blogged about it for the Guardian – ‘What is the value of linked data to the news industry?’, saying:

“With the news industry facing structural change and a global advertising downturn, there is naturally an emphasis on whether any new tools and techniques can “make more money”. One way of making more money is in fact to “spend less money”. There may well be an economy of scale in agreeing to some linked data principles.”

There are certain areas, like politics and sports events, where we all rely on the same basic set of facts – who is standing in which constituency, or which teams feature in which league. I think we potentially waste a lot of money by all carefully building the same databases.

The Guardian has also worked towards integrating our content with the wider web using linked data principles. MusicBrainz is a wiki-style service which a unique ID for every music artist ever, so 2cd475bb-1abd-40c4-9904-6d4b691c752c represents Franz Liszt and 2aaf7396-6ab8-40f3-9776-a41c42c8e26 represents LCD Soundsystem. We have added these codes to the metadata of our articles, and so now you can query the API using them and be sure that you are getting disambiguated content about that specific artist.

MusicBrainz IDs and ISBN numbers are just two types of ‘reference’ we maintain within our content database, and we are hope that they are the first of many that we will be able to make accessible to the public through the Open Platform.

Our API returns data in JSON and XML formats, and there are strong feelings in the linked open data community about which are the appropriate formats to use. Some argue that unless you are using formats and technologies like RDFa, OWL and SPARQL then you are not really part of the community. I recently wrote an article that addressed this point for the Nodalities blog run by semantic technology company Talis.

“We try to work in a lightweight and agile way, and providing the data in this format was the simplest way to meet our immediate requirements. We are trying to concentrate on making more metadata available. If we were to decide to invest in triple-stores and implement a SPARQL endpoint first, then I’d wager that we would still be waiting to dip our toe into the water. I’m entirely agnostic about formats myself. What I think is most important is that we provide consistent, RESTful, predictable, persistent hooks into Guardian.co.uk content, in as many ways as possible, with the right licence for re-use.”

Following the success of previous panel discussions about data journalism at news:rewired events, we wanted to focus on the potential of linked data for news and media organisations this time around. Martin Belam and Simon Rogers from the Guardian, Silver Oliver from the BBC and Martin Moore from the Media Standards Trust will discuss the topic.

You’ll find some useful websites, blog posts and tools listed below. But to kick us off – what exactly is “linked data”?

According to the appropriately name Linkeddata.org, Linked data is “about using the web to connect related data that wasn’t previously linked, or using the web to lower the barriers to linking data currently linked using other methods”.

From our speaker Martin Belam, information architect at the Guardian:

I think that one of the most important things to understand about a ‘Linked Data’ future for news is that this is about building a platform for a range of products and services. When we think of the ‘open’ web, it is easy for the net-heads and neophiles amongst us to assume that this has to mean free as in free beer, as well as free as in free speech.

It doesn’t.

News organisations need digital tools in three spheres – in the commissioning and production of content, in the B2B sphere that so many of us are also active in, and in producing B2C ‘news’ for our audiences. ‘Open’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘open’ to all of the public, it could mean ‘open’ within the industry, or ‘open’ with specific partners.

Useful blog posts

• Speaker Martin Belam’s posts on his blog currybet.net that cover linked data can be found at this link.
• Particularly worth reading are his thoughts on:

1. Linked data and its role in ‘journalism-centred design’ – http://www.currybet.net/cbet_blog/2009/09/linked-data-and-the-future-of.php;
2. The impact of a lack of interoperable publishing technology for media organisations: – http://www.currybet.net/cbet_blog/2009/09/linked-data-and-the-future-of-1.php
3. What is the value of linked data to the news industry? http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/insideguardian/2010/jan/25/news-linked-data-summit;
4. A history of linked data at the BBC – http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/editors/2010/02/24/a-history-of-linked-data-at-the-bbc/.

• Tom Scott’s presentation on linking the BBC to “the linked data cloud”;
• Martin Moore on the use of linked data to build Journalisted – http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/05/an-involuntary-facebook-for-reporters-and-their-work-martin-moore-on-the-u-k-s-journalisted/

Tools, tips and examples

• The Guardian’s data store and datablog;
• The Guardian’s MPs’ expenses application as an example of data journalism ‘linked in’ to the crowd;
• Linkeddata.org, which also has a useful glossary of terms;
• How the BBC used Linked Data to manage and publish its World Cup site – http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2010/07/the_world_cup_and_a_call_to_ac.html;
• Linked data at the New York Times from Richard Cyganiak – http://richard.cyganiak.de/blog/2009/10/linked-data-at-the-new-york-times-exciting-but-buggy;
• The New York Times’ linked data site – http://data.nytimes.com/;
• Ten reasons why news organisations should start using linked data from Martin Moore on PBS Mediashift – http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2010/03/10-reasons-why-news-organizations-should-use-linked-data073.html;

Issues to discuss

• How can linked data aid the redistribution of content?
• How can linked data change editorial workflows and content management?
• How can it be used by journalists as a research tool and to find stories?
• How can the news industry and media organisation’s prepare and adapt for increased availability of data?
• Can linked data make your website more accessible?

Linking Open Data cloud diagram, by Richard Cyganiak and Anja Jentzsch. http://lod-cloud.net/