Posts Tagged ‘Sunderland’
Spent an hour at Venerable Bede school in Ryton, Sunderland today talking about a newsletter project they hope to get off the ground. If only everyone grasped the power of complementary print and web products as well as these enthusiastic Year 7 and 9 pupils. They were full of ideas, excitement and great questions, so [...]
Ninety-five per cent of users won’t pay for online news content - that’s according to a poll I ran on www.sunderlandecho.com for 24 hours yesterday. Visitors responded as follows to our multiple choice questionnaire: How much are you prepared to pay for news content online? Nothing 95% (378 votes) 5p per article 0% (1 vote) £1 per month [...]
I’m carrying out what is hopefully an interesting experiment, inspired by The Telegraph via George Hopkin, Johnston Press’ SEO evangelist. We have a big screen in the newsroom which is meant to display our website in an echo of 1984′s nightmarish propaganda walls. But we’re now using Twitter aggregation site www.twitterfall.com to filter in tweets [...]
It’s on days like today that I’m glad I work online. A choice error appeared in our print edition (though it was changed on the presses to avoid disaster). A headline about a lucky dog’s stage debut alongside a cute kid shouted: ‘It’s not such a hard-kock life for Lennie’. Oh, dear – we said ‘kock’. It’s sometimes [...]
Ok, so it was a no-brainer. Who cares? Newcastle United’s change strip was unveiled and it looked like something an Oompa Loompa would use to wipe his backside. I work for the Sunderland Echo. What could we do other than mercilessly take the proverbial?
They’re hardly new, but the power of live web chats for connecting with audiences, driving interaction and pulling in traffic should make them a staple for any digital newsroom. Best of all, with CoverItLive they are incredibly easy to set up – just log on to their site, register for a free account and place the embed code they [...]
Any local newspaper is only as big as the village/town/city/area it serves, but the sky’s the limit when it comes to attracting an audience online. In two years at the Sunderland Echo our most popular story by far has been the tale of two Wearside twins who revealed a secret double life of escorting and [...]
Having investigated whether any local papers are live blogging the Premier League I’ve only found one title that is doing so independently, and it seems they are operating outside the rules. Under the terms of the tiered Dataco licence you can only update with three texts and nine images if you’ve signed a Level One agreement, and with nine [...]
One staple source of stories for local newspapers is the RSPCA press office. The tales of cruelty we hear are routinely stomach-churning, but sometimes we get images that are genuinely shocking – even to hardened news hacks. A recent example of this involved photographs we received of a horse found dismembered in a river. The key image was gruesome; the animal’s severed [...]
I’ve not seen a live blog of a Premier League clash on a local newspaper site. Most of the live football coverage centres on lower league sides and the occasional FA Cup game. To officially blog from a game you have to be mindful of the Dataco agreement which covers fixtures, results and reporting on England’s [...]
