Taken directly from a column by Chris Peck in the Commercial Appeal:

News will be generated by the people who are chosen, not the chosen people.

News will be more a conversation about making sense of the world, less of a sermon from on high.

 

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We have been working on search engine optimization on our sites for the past few weeks - and I just stumbled upon this interesting blog entry from Chris Vannoy (Newspapers and the search game) who works for a paper outside of New York City. They happen to use the same content management system as the Telegraph, which caught my eye

On a tangent from his point it got me thinking the purpose of SEO is not just getting a higher ranking on a Google search, but actually making the site accessible to search engines so readers can get what they want, no matter how they find us.

Well, we almost got our online Forums fixed today, but not quite. A planned upgrade of our content management system (Saxotech) was scheduled yesterday, postponed, then started this afternoon.

This afternoon as in Friday at 1pm prior to a 3-day holiday weekend. Any project managers or engineers out there will be laughing already.

So, the upgrade almost worked, but not really, so it was rolled back to the previous version - and we will try again Tuesday.

Stay tuned.

A good read if you are interested in the state of newspapers and what they (we) are doing to keep and compete for readers:

American Journalism Review: Remaking the Front Page

Wow - since no one is going to get past the title, except our science/tech writer Dave Brooks, just a short update on some changes to the blogs today. 

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Much like the breaking news from Chevy Chase on Saturday Night Live in 1975, the Telegraph Web site found itself repeating itself Saturday morning.

 

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Another new feature on the Web site today - AP video news: AP Video @ The Telegraph

 

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An interesting article in The Editor's Weblog, (no not Nick's Editor's Blog a different Editor!) concerning the pressures involved in online journalism.

"If it's so easy to get things wrong when they're done quickly, is it worth risking posting information before it is confirmed?...If their journalists increasingly function in this way without the proper factchecking and editing, won't newspapers lose readers? They understand that everyone makes mistakes. But isn't it important to get the facts straight for the audience. Isn't that the job of a newspaper?"

 

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We are having a fairly busy (but thankfully dry) day at the paper today - but I could not let our first Google Maps mashup pass without comment:

Area Road Closures

 

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Jupiter research released a new report this week: The New Demographics of Online News Competing with Portals for Younger Audiences. It costs $750 to read it, so I will not be - but the Poynter Institute sums it up here.

The highlight for a community newspaper is that while big portals (Yahoo, AOL, Google etc.) do attract a large audience of younger news readers, local media will continue to be the destination for local news. Sort of obvious thinking there, but nice to have a $750 report to confirm it.

 

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Google released another interesting tool out of beta the other day: Google Trends. I am sure it has some serious applications, but most of the talk has been along the lines of Aim Fight, e.g - matching two terms for fun to see which wins. So not to be left out: Red Sox v.s. Yankees Nashua NH v.s. Lowell, MA Google v.s. Yahoo

Regular visitors to the site may have noticed the Telegraph reader forums have been largely missing for the past few months. Unfortunately, that has been on purpose, though we have not been happy about it. 

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As sources of news (according to a BBC/Reuters/Media Center poll) we trust: Local newspapers: 81% National TV: 75% Radio: 73% Blogs: 25% So - does that mean that a newspaper blog is trusted by 106%?

Just fixed the RSS feeds on the right rail - so the title of the feed shows up correctly. Having some fun learning a bit off PHP, but really more fun figuring out how much 'stuff' I can fit onto these pages. 

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Here is a copy of the note we sent to The Telegraph staff announcing the official launch today:

 

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