freeg131: Philip Gamble

If I want to get news about my home town online there only appears to be one credible option at the moment.

That being the local newspaper website which insists on squeezing articles and relevant comments into a section less than a third the width of the webpage.  It really is hideous and bizarrely the homepage is little better as the site, like the many clones for other towns which have a newspaper produced by Newsquest, has a stupid marquee displaying jobs from one of their partners.  That said the coverage is much better than I have been able to get anywhere else although the sheer amount of scrolling required to use the site is immensely annoying thanks to all the surrounding adverts and links to totally unrelated material on the site.

One good feature of the Watford Observer website is its blog section which has 21 local residents writing about local issues or what they have been up to providing bloggers with an audience and extra content for the paper at zero cost.

Another local publication, the free monthly MyWatfordNews magazine has a very underutilised website. There were formerly separate websites for each local area covered by the company but now they all redirect to a single central website which has marquees and rotating and sliding banners galore. It’s like the 1990s on Geocities. But worse. And this is a professional publication that wants your advertising spend. On the site there are two large navigateable-to articles on the homepage with another give a link at the bottom. The physical magazines can be viewed via a built-in pdf style viewer but the articles are not given their own pages on the website.  The magazine is really good and I enjoy reading it but the website is absolutely shocking.

The BBC offers little and I don’t think anyone would realistically expect them to be competing with, or even allowed to compete against, these publications.

Next up are the OurSiteName<InsertNameOfOneTownFromAListOfAHundredHere> type directory sites that want to get local small businesses advertising on them.  Sometimes, but not always, these sites include a “Local information guide” or selection of news articles about the local area they are targeting.

On thebestofwatford this comes in the form of a blog. Although coverage is at the rate of less than one brief article a day which are mostly press releases this actually appears to be the best ‘blog’ of local news.  It is clearly written by someone local and is illustrated with photos.

Activ Watford has a ‘news‘ page however it is clearly not their priority as is the eighth tab across in the navigation menu after various classified ad categories. The news, all linked to on external sites, is imported via some kind of RSS search and at the moment at least 50% of the stories relate to a Watford many thousands of miles away in the USA.  Not good.  The site also has a hard to get to ‘information’ page which contains links to press release (council, police, charities etc) articles on the site.

It is very hard for these websites without a physical local presence to get an audience and the Watford Observer clearly have a huge advantage over the other offerings by being part of a large network.  This brings deals with national advertisers and of course local journalists already on the ground and the content posted online would be produced anyway for inclusion in the paper.

However I do think that there is an opportunity for a second local news website to add some variety and perhaps cover some different stories.  I think MyWatfordNews is the best placed to do this as they deliver their magazine to thousands of homes each month with the website address printed on the front and clearly have managed to monetize their website buy selling adverts to local businesses.  They also have to produce content each month for the magazine and this could easily be published online.

MyNews charge £50 a month for a front page advert on the homepage of their network of websites (which cover surrounding towns and villages).  I currently count 5 large adverts in rotation and one small advert on the homepage.  Potentially £250+ a month although I doubt the quoted price is what these companies are actually paying.

Knutsford, with a population about a quarter that of Watford, is a good example of a town with 2 online news sources. There is the Newsquest Knutsford Guardian (change the “knutsfordguardian” section of the URL to any other paper in the network to see the masthead change) and the independent Knutsford Times.  If they can have two credible online news websites why can’t we?

A bizarre title I hope you’ll agree.

I receive a daily Google Alert informing me of webpages that refer to a park in my hometown.  The linked pages often provide information about an event that has taken place or is taking place that might be of interest to me and the readers of my websites about the park.

Amongst the more normal entries, many referring to the recent Watford 10K race, one result jumped out at me as being, well, unusual.

Keyword targeting gone wrong.   But there is more.  I visited the site and it appeared to be very badly stuffed with keywords – back to the old days of keyword lists at the end of the page – but with the addition of top of page keywords too!

But who could have built such a terrible website? Apparently a company called BTCustomerStreet who cold-call small businesses selling them online promotion packages which apparently encourage sticking keywords in irelevant locations on your website (see below).

Not only that but there have been a lot of complaints about the sales tactics used by the company.  The complaints show the price structure is pretty random with most businesses being charged about £300 for set-up and then an ongoing £50 a month fee.

What do you get for your ~£1,100 a year? A template website and inclusion on some directories owned by the same company which apparently normally charge a £200 setup fee and £30 a month for a listing. Each. Yeah right.  I hadn’t even heard of any of them before.

Here’s another equally bad site targeted at the same area.

I have an extension installed in Chrome which provides a link to Google Maps when text from a webpage is selected if the plugin judges it to be an address.  You can get the extension here.

Fair enough if you highlight a real address but Google Maps also thinks it can find “Up to 1000” and “6” E Ink” (taken from a website about an eBook reader).  An interesting way to discover random locations around the world, in this case  what is presumably a posh American estate built around a forested golf course on windy roads and an octagonal prison on “S T O Road” in India.

Incidentally I am of the opinion that eBook readers are almost as pointless as digital photo frames.

Results of the Conservatives campaigning:  +5.3% gain.  From third place to taking the seat.
Results of the Liberal Democrats negative campaigning: +1.1% gain. Remain in second place.  Oh and the “can’t win here” Conservatives won.  Here.

A standard A4 sheet made from 80 grams/m² paper weighs 5 grams. I counted the equivalent of 14 A4 sized pieces of paper being delivered by the Lib Dems in Watford whilst I have been there (either addressed to me or not addressed to any particular member of the household). That’s 70 grammes.

Based on one person per house (in reality some of the literature was received in our house multiple times as it was addressed to each voter in the household) the paper usage comes out at:
(55,208 / 68.3) * 100 * (70 grams) = 5,658.21376 kilograms
(I couldn’t find the registered number of voters in the constituency anywhere so I calculated the total potential voters figure – 80,831.6 – from the BBC total votes and percentage turnout figures)

That’s 5.65 metric tonnes of paper or 1,131,64.75 pieces A4 paper delivered across Watford.

Also worth noting that these figures exclude leaflets/letters that arrived before I came back for Easter or after I left to go back to University.  I wonder how this compares to the local paper’s usage throughout the year, just a fraction of it I suspect.

Apparently a media war has just begun in Birmingham.

Last week we received a copy of The Birmingham Press through our door.  Until this came through I hadn’t considered the fact that in almost a year of living in Selly Oak we haven’t once had a free paper pushed through our door.

This was the second issue of a paper which has apparently been launched to target the lucrative property advertising sector.  With the average Birmingham house price currently £154,459 consider the fact that if an Estate Agent charged just a 1% fee they would receive more than £1,500 – and I’m no expert but it seems the average fee is above a single percentage point.

Apparently, and surprising if entirely true, there are no Birmingham-wide free papers only the paid-for daily Birmingham Mail and weekly paid-for Birmingham Post run by the same company. The owners of these titles launched Birmingham Post Lite as a spoiler a day before the first Press issue.

Incidentally the Press is on sale at 50p (soon to be £1) but is being distributed at irregular intervals to, according to the under construction website, “to up to 25,000 selected, ABC1 homes throughout the area”. Let’s just say I don’t think I live in an ABC1 area.

TheLondonPaper and the spoiler London Lite which together had a combined circulation of over 800,000 copies lasted 3 years before rapidly closing one after another, however The Evening Standard got a new owner and new business  model to fill the gap left.

A few interesting articles about the launch/impending war:

• Former Post editor gives Press ‘six months’ to live
• Press apparently contained on a single laptop
• Former Mail editor doesn’t think the ‘spoiler’ Birmingham Post Lite was a good idea