David Black

Paul Bradshaw: “the redesign is a massive improvement and much more pleasurable to browse. Aesthetically it beats competitors such as the Lancashire Evening Post and Hull Daily Mail hands-down”

“Trinity Mirror is relaunching all of its local newspaper websites, as it looks to improve the interactivity of its regional sites and enhance the user’s personal experience. “

“The Liverpool Daily Post and Liverpool Echo websites have been relaunched in the first stage of a major overhaul of Trinity Mirror’s regional newspaper websites which runs alongside web training for journalists.”

Graham Charlton: “All in all, the redesign has improved both sites, and the added emphasis on UGC is a smart move that will make for a stickier experience for users. “

New, improved and freshly relaunched Liverpool Echo newspaper site – more interactivity, community and multimedia, and updated design.

New and improved newspaper site for the Liverpool Daily Post.

Martin Stabe: “Trinity Mirror will begin an overhaul all of its regional newspaper web sites today with the relaunch of the Liverpool Echo and the Liverpool Daily Post sites.”

“The Liverpool Daily Post and Liverpool Echo have unveiled new-look websites today, in the first stage of a major overhaul of the websites of Trinity Mirror’s regional titles.”

Mica Swyers: “The redesigned sites are now easier to use and include more space for audience input and user-generated content.”

“These revamps are the first of a series of mid-market revamps to be rolled out after nine months of work and a refocus on multimedia content”

Oliver Luft: “The Liverpool Daily Post and Liverpool Echo websites are relaunching today in the first stage of a major overhaul of Trinity Mirror’s regional websites.”

“Trinity Mirror has relaunched The Liverpool Daily Post and Liverpool Echo websites, forming the first stage of its regional online overhaul. “

Liz Ruskin: “The redesigns have richer coverage of breaking news, including video and audio, extended reader blogs and user-generated content.”

“Time Warner Inc. plans to launch a test of its overhauled news portal on Tuesday, drawing influences from the uncluttered design of popular Internet blogs.”

“Micro-blogging allows you to write brief text updates about your life on the go, and send them to friends and interested observers via text messaging, instant messaging, email or the web.”

“Even taking into account the power and ease of use of user-generated content tools like digital cameras and affordable audio/video production software, there are more content consumers than creators.” Shock.

“Richard Foan, ABC Electronic managing director, said that moving to a daily average figure could provide publishers with a more accurate picture of user behaviour”

John Duncan: “Newspapers are declining (for lots of reasons), the websites of newspapers are growing (slowly, if at all).” Hmmmmmmmm.

WAN report on youth media trends: “While most participants do not view video sharing sites like YouTube or blogs as credible first sources for news, many participants see them as channels for voicing opinion.”

“I find it all hard to believe – not only that digg has 22 Million monthly unique visitors, but also that they have more monthly unique visitors than Facebook.”

McClatchy CEO Gary Pruritt: “While ad revenue may be the best indicator of your current performance, I think the best indicator of your future performance is your audience.”

Round-up of latest print and digital trading results and quotes from US newspaper groups.

Total like-for-like ad revenues including digital down 2.3% yoy for first 5 months. Digital revenues up 34.7%.

JD Lasica: “When citizen publishers want to launch community news sites, where do they turn? Building a publishing infrastructure from the ground up is no easy task.”

“Share of UK visits to BBC.co.uk continue to grow, up 13% year on year in May, however it is far outpaced by gains from YouTube. YouTube’s share of UK visits were up nearly 7-fold (669%) year on year in May and up 140% in the past six-months. “

Cool local site from MySociety: “Report, view, or discuss local problems
(like graffiti, fly tipping, broken paving slabs, or street lighting)” (Was previously neighbourhoodfix-it.com)

The signal-to-noise ratio on Facebook is getting worse following its explosive growth and platform launch. Fred Wilson: “I see a different Facebook problem. Invite overload and application noise.”

Jeff Jarvis on the Federated Media advertising kerfuffle: “I’ll just speak for myself with my advertising policy in greater detail”

“Some 80% of the UK online population age 15+ initiated a video stream in April 2007, compared with 79% in France, 76% in the US, and 70% in Germany, according to comScore.”

“How about this statement from a national newspaper executive: localisation is one of the keys to future media success and the regional press is perfectly placed to exploit it. “

“In Great Britain, 31 percent of British adults do not access online news sites with any regularity and an additional 28 percent of them only access them about once a week.” [Via Andy Dickinson]

“PA will supply text, video, stills and interactive graphics as individual assets linked by meta data, allowing local online editors to take only those elements that they want in order to combine with their own reports or assemble into… packages”

“a social network that lets people express multiple identities in multiple ways is almost always going to dominate a network that tries to confine identity within a singular niche.”

“With online revenue growth slowing and print revenue continuing to drop, companies at the Mid-Year Media Review this week have a grim picture to discuss.”

“the beauty of a many emergent social media services is that their simplicity and openness means that myself and other users can engage with them as much, or as little, as we want yet we’re still able to keep at least one foot in the conversation.”

Adtech figures: “the current click-through rate of 0.18%, representing the lowest since the ad serving technology firm started the measurement in 2004. Then, the average was 0.33 per cent.”

“A new AAF study (that I haven’t been to able to get a hold of yet) says that major ad spenders are in the process of moving up to 20% of their total ad budget to online media. If true, that is a huge shift, up from 4-8% at present.”

“they should be looking at the relationship between absolute increases and decreases in ad revenue over time.”

“81% of respondents saying they regularly consume both kinds of media”

“[traditional publishers] still see branding as a function of controlling the distribution channel, rather than branding each unit of content that must now live and survive on its own in a disaggregated online media ecosystem.”

“global newspaper sales up 2.3 per cent last year (and 9.48 per cent in the past five years), ad revenues up 3.7 per cent and 15.7 per cent over the same two spans. If this is doom and gloom, give me another helping…”

“The New York Times again topped other newspapers in Web traffic in May, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. It reports that nytimes.com had 12,755,000 unique visitors in May compared to 13,735,000 in April. “

“be consistent. If you’re going to provide “in-text” links, then provide them in a consistent manner – don’t link to internal documents and then to an external site and then neglect text links to other sites”

“The Cobi project (Community Behavioural Models in User-Content Interaction) is a research cooperation project that started in April 2007.”

“Disney’s US sports network ESPN has acquired specialist cricket website Cricinfo for an undisclosed sum.”

“It wasn’t that long ago that 100,000 users was considered huge for a Web 2.0 related business. Today a small startup such as SpaceTime can gain those numbers in two weeks.”

15-24s spending 24% more time online than average users – Comscore.

“How do print publishers know when they have successfully “made the transition to digital”? Here’s Time Warner CEO Dick Parsons:”

“ITV will relaunch its ITV.com service on Tuesday, enabling viewers to watch shows such as Coronation Street live online. The £20m revamp will launch on June 12…”

“I for one am not eager to turn off my devices and pay all my attention to one thing at a time, one moment at a time. There are too many targets on the horizon, too many members of the tribe, and too many jaguars lurking in the shadows for that.”

“The News & Records in Greensboro, N.C., a Landmark paper, announced this afternoon that it is laying off 41 staffers.”

“Gumtree entered the top 20 Shopping & Classifieds websites in May, based on share of UK visits. Share of UK Internet visits to Gumtree increased 69% year on year in May, 35% in the past six months and 9% in the past month.”

“Jim Cruickshank, the group marketing and interactive director at GCap Media, is leaving the radio company to join Multimap.com.”

Audio, video, cameras, software etc.

Mario Garcia on Poynter’s eyetrack study from a few months back: “The tradition we have seen that you read the newspaper from cover to cover like your grandpa used to is gone, gone forever”

“the pressing need is not for people who can write code with one hand and stories with the other. What journalists do need is working digital literacy.”

“There are two skill sets in this equation: journalism and coding. Both are needed in the new media landscape.”

“In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.” [Via Suw]

OPA: “Mobile Web access is now nearly ubiquitous; usage lags access, but strong growth expected in ‘07″ UK has highest mobile web use of Western nations.

Les Hinton: ”This is necessary because newspaper revenues are coming under pressure at a time when other costs are rising and we are also investing in digital media.”

As well as 15- or 30-second ads during programmes, Joost will experiment with “a small graphic called an ‘ad bug’ [that] will float in the corner of the screen reminding users of the brand that was just advertised.”

“the best you can do is to increase opportunities and lower barriers to participation. A lurker rate of 80% is better than 90%.”

“If people don’t comment on a blog post, for instance, why would they suddenly upload a six minute video?”

Six levels of participation: creators (13%), critics (19%), collectors (15%), joiners (19%), spectators (33%) and inactives (52%).