Gary Andrews

At Exeter St David’s train station last week, I picked up something I’ll never be able to buy again – a daily copy of the local paper, the Express and Echo. It was just under a month ago that the somewhat sad news that my hometown’s paper would become a weekly rather than daily publication.

I say sad for two reasons. Firstly because it’s never fun to see local journalism cut back, even if the economic climate is heading that way.

But it’s also sad because this has been coming for a while, largely due to continually bad decisions from the Echo’s owners, Northcliffe.

I’m not saying that the daily Echo’s demise was preventable – it may well have been inevitable no matter what – but the paper could have been given much more of a fighting chance.

Even when I moved away from Devon, I made a point of picking up the Echo whenever I returned to visit friends and family. The past few times have been painful to read.

The last few Echos I’ve purchased have been a shell of the brash, confident publication that was happy to cause trouble for local politicians and had an instinctive connection with the communities it served.

What was in front of me was like seeing a once-proud athlete towards the end of his life. The only surprise about the Echo going weekly is it didn’t happen sooner.

Let me declare my feelings. I am an unashamed fan of local media done well. That is, after all, my background.

Yes, I’m well aware of the foibles and failures of local newspapers. They can be unnecessarily hyperbolic and trivial, often in the same news story. They can sometimes become parodies of themselves.

They could, as I found out from speaking to various focuses of the subjects of their stories, occasionally play somewhat fast and loose. At my old office, we had an file of some of their worst hits, including one story several experienced journalists were amazed they didn’t get pulled up on contempt charges.

But despite all this, much of the Echo is recalled with fondness. They were terrier-like in holding local politicians to account. When a big story broke, their coverage was never less than impressive. And they knew how to serve the community and readership.

Yes, some stories may have seemed mundane but locals from outlying areas really appreciated the coverage given to these smaller stories.

Given the Echo’s patch took in the regional capital city, seaside towns, rural market towns and sleepy villages, their ability to strike a balance with these readers was impressive.

When I was much younger and dreamt of going into journalism, at that point I always considered the Echo the paper I wanted to work for. And 20 years ago, it had a well-liked reputation with its readership.

Even as recently as six years ago, the Echo was a pretty impressive regional paper. It had a confidence and swagger about it. Yes, that also brought out some of the worst aspects, as detailed above, but it also brought out the best.

Working in a competitor (of sorts) newsroom at the same time, I would frequently roll my eyes, but would frequently be impressed with their scoops and determination to reflect and be a heart of the community they served.

Those qualities have seriously declined in recent years. Journalists were cut back. Fewer reporters meant a restricted ability to embed with the community. It became easier to spot the press releases in the paper.

It made sense, financially, to re-use the same reports from the sister Devon-wide Western Morning News. But this paper served a different audience, and it became harder to find distinctive news in the Echo as a result.

And then there’s the web, something regional media companies never seemed to get or be prepared to get.

For a period, the Echo went big into video, posting clips of any and every story, plus doing a news in 60 seconds, featuring cutaways to the headline in the paper.

It wasn’t particularly well done or thought through. A couple of people I knew there said they were given very little training. But at least they tried something, although it didn’t seem hard to see how this could have been much more focused, and relevant to their audience. And it asked a lot of print journalists to learn a new skill and do it well, with a minimum of training.

But at least it was better than how the web is currently being treated. The pages are, astonishingly, updated from a central location in a different county on the other side of the country.

News is often not uploaded until 10am. Sports reports, one of the key selling points of a local paper, are often uploaded up to two days after the game. By this stage, anybody interested will have found the news elsewhere.

There is little incentive for readers to discover or return to their website on a daily, even weekly basis. It is as if this part of the paper has been deliberately left to die.

Perhaps a weekly Echo will see the paper regain some of its swagger. Perhaps I’m optimistic but I think a daily could work in Exeter. Just not a daily in the current form. And they may need to be more innovative elsewhere.

But, going offline, it’s the local communities who will be hit the most by this. The Office of National Statistics shows that 23% of the UK population have no internet at home. In Devon and Somerset, that accounts for around 750,000 households. In the most rural areas of these counties, the number is, I would wager, even higher.

For the outlying villages in Devon, this means they are even further cut off from the news. One of the strengths of the Echo was balancing the ultra local with the big stories, and knowing each of these communities. What’s more, these were read and appreciated. Will that continue? It’s not as if many rural, elderly households can log online for their information.

Local businesses may also feel the pinch, initially. These small-to-medium size businesses probably don’t have the PR budget to go all out on a campaign, can’t go beyond a certain level of advertising, and often rely on local papers to print their good news stories. Will there be space for these?

I say initially, though, because for businesses there’s generally an opportunity to be innovative and less reliant on the local press.

But the local events, such as fundraisers or community days, may seriously struggle to compete for attention. Granted, these aren’t exactly the hardest-hitting news stories, but they do serve the community.

Sports fans and clubs wanting local reporting will also be badly served. That’s not to say there’s not alternatives online, but local sport is a staple of a local paper, and a key reason for purchase.

How many of those will discontinue reading it because the results are a week late? And how will the clubs reach out to attract new fans or members? The Echo says the coverage will be even better. Many will be skeptical.

Time will tell what effect a weekly Echo will have on Exeter, and East and Mid Devon. It may revitalise the paper. Or it may be a large step towards the eventual collapse. In the immediate term, the main losers are the readers.

written by Gary \\ tags: Exeter, Express and Echo, local news, local newspapers

I’ve never wished to be particularly down on one paper, so apologies to the paper of my hometown, the Express and Echo, but because I probably visit their website more than most, they probably get a lot of criticism. And a couple of days ago they provided another example of why local newspapers are in all sorts of trouble.

On Tuesday, Exeter City met Plymouth Argyle in their first competitive meeting in eight years. Not the most significant fixture in a busy evening of football, but in local sport terms this was as big as it’s likely to get.

Exeter ended up defeating Argyle 2-1 with a dramatic late winner and, like any other exiled Grecian, I spent much of the immediate aftermath reading forums, Tweeting, on Facebook and even on the phone.

I’ve long since given up on expecting any kind of immediate update on the Echo’s website, so didn’t bother checking it after the game, but the next morning I checked. Nothing. The lead football story was how the club’s back-up goalkeeper was hoping to establish himself with a run in the team.

At 11am the next day, a full 13 and a half hours after the game had been played, the match report finally made it to the site. I only found out through an unofficial Exeter City Twitter feed that aggregates City content from all over the web that the report was up.

By that time, the story had moved on massively to the violence in the aftermath of the game, the reaction to the violence from both clubs, and the team looking ahead to the weekend’s game. Anybody with access to the internet could have already read match reports and reaction on the official site, the Western Morning News, the BBC, Facebook conversations and on the unofficial forum, Exeweb. There was no need to read a now out-of-date report at 11am.

The only people who, realistically, would have any cause to buy the paper would be people who didn’t have access to the internet, hadn’t been at the game, hadn’t listened to it on the radio, and hadn’t phoned a friend at the game for a match report. I can’t imagine this number being particularly high.

Sport is a fast-moving commodity that can deliver very good hits if the timing of publication and the SEO is any good. A report over twelve hours after the game had been played – when this was easily a huge sporting story – on a major media outlet fails in just about every sense.

Increasingly, sports fans, with their own community, don’t need their local papers for sport, if the effort put in doesn’t result in a compelling offering. The huge saturation in sports coverage coupled with advances in social media, and the good old-fashioned forums, mean local papers are increasingly becoming irrelevant on an area they should have sown up, given their exclusive access.

At the moment, it feels like the Echo’s site has regressed (and I’d imagine they’ve had budget cuts) and is an afterthought. They will bring in no new readers through the web, as internet savvy news junkies will already have the news from elsewhere. The readership of their print paper is declining. This does not bode well for their future.

(And I don’t say this with any pleasure at all. I would be genuinely sad if the area lost its paper. Even an out of date paper is better than no paper.)

written by Gary \\ tags: Exeter City, Express and Echo, local media, local newspapers

Sometimes I fear I give the Express and Echo – the newspaper for my home city of Exeter – somewhat of a rough ride. Given I know the area better than most papers, their site is one I tend to visit on a more regular basis than others, hence my worry that any criticisms are probably no more than nitpicking on my part.

And then I get days like today, where the criticism is checked least it becomes too cutting.

Why? Like many others, I’ve been somewhat glued to the ongoing news around the economic crisis, and yesterday came the news that local authorities across the country had significant sums of money tied up in the Icelandic banking system. Devon’s council’s, at first, didn’t appear among them.

I was out last night, so didn’t get time to check again until this morning when the first place I read about it was on Exeter City matchday programme editor Mike Blackstone’s football blog (yes, I check my football feeds before anything else. Force of habit).

Seeing Exeter City Council’s name on the list made me search for more. Naturally, the first place I headed was the Echo’s site, only to forget they don’t post their full articles online immediately, so instead I found this:

COUNCIL leaders are battling to recover millions of pounds invested in Iceland’s troubled banks.

But they are attempting to ease fears public services could be affected, claiming there is “no short-term risk” despite the crisis.

The reassurance comes amid the news South West councils have hefty cash deposits in several financial institutions, including high street banks.

Despite initial reports that Devon’s councils did not have investments in collapsed Icelandic banks, it has now emerged that Exeter City Council has £5m invested, including £3m with Landsbanki and a £2m on deposit with Glitnir.

For the full story see Friday’s paper.

Which told me absolutely nothing whatsoever that I didn’t already know. 

Incidentally, in between starting this blog post ten minutes ago (11.10pm) and now, the full text has become available. A bit too late, really as I’d already found what I needed to know elsewhere.

A quick Google News search found much better articles on the Exmouth Herald’s site (which is a much smaller paper) and the sister site of Devon-wide paper, the Western Morning News. The latter was understandably Devon-centric but also told me, for the first time, that Mid Devon District Council – which covers where my family live – also had a lesser sum of money tied up in an Icelandic bank.

Had the full Echo article been online at that point in time, I wouldn’t have needed to go elsewhere to find this out. Nor try and fill in the Exeter-specific gaps that I simply couldn’t find anywhere else.

A cursory search of del.icio.us and Digg didn’t turn up anything, not was there anything more specific on the blog searches. None of these were a massive surprise (although possibly says something about social media, or lack of takeup, and Devon). Had I had time, I’d have searched WordPress tags.

As it is, I sent off a couple of emails to friends I was fairly sure would be in the know, and got most of the information through that. I did briefly consider ringing up the press office at the council to find out more, and then blog it [1] (which raises another interesting point about blogs and citizen journalism, but I’ll leave that for another time).

[In case you're asking why I'm so interested, it's because this used to be my reporting patch and was home for around 21 years, so I tend to take a strong interest, even if I don't live there any more].

So, you may say, what does this matter. In some respects, it doesn’t. I’m just one person writing on a probably not very widely read blog about something that irks me. Hell, it’s not as if there aren’t enough of *those* around.

But, on the other hand, it’s still a potential eyeball that they’re losing elsewhere. As soon as I couldn’t find what I was looking for, I wet elsewhere. Now they’ve actually stuck the article up, I clicked around the site without ever really thinking.

And, what really gets to me, is they have the news, but I have to spend a bit longer searching elsewhere to find it. As a result, I’ve now pulled together several Devon-related news feeds from assorted sources meaning I don’t have to go back to the site unless there’s something of burning interest.

I’m pretty sure I can’t be the only person with ties to Exeter who checks all their news online each morning rather than in the paper, and has a decent set of RSS news feeds relevant to their interests.

The world’s a global place. People have moved around. Yet I suspect I’m also not alone in being a person who keeps tabs on the news ‘back home’ even though I no longer live there. To be unable to access this news on the basis that you don’t live within the paper’s sales area is crazy. We’re global citizens, but we’d still like hyperlocal news for areas we’re connected to m’kaaay?

[Again, another question here - in this current economic climate would it be worth the site offering the paper online on a subscription basis? I'll leave that one dangling.]

This isn’t the first time I’ve had a little moan about this particular pet peeve, and it probably won’t be the last.

It’s a shame because, as I often point out, there’s a lot I like and respect about the Echo – both in the paper and on the website.

I can get Exeter City news elsewhere (and did a long time before I moved). Big national stories of interest occurring in Exeter I can also get elsewhere (although recognise the nationals probably will have a more general overview than the excellent local reporting you often get in these situations).

But this is the first time there’s been a specific local story I’ve been keen to read. I suspect that it won’t be too long before I can get most information on any further local stories I want to find out more about without having to wait until 11pm to read the full article.

A quick plea to finish: please, please, please, any local papers who partake in this habit – open your articles up. It really will help your brand and paper in the long run.

[1] Technically, although I work full-time in a non-journalism job, I can classify myself as freelance, even if it’s football and media writing and not reporting.

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: credit crunch, economic crisis, Exeter City Council, Express and Echo, hyperlocal news, Iceland, Icelandic banks, local news

This is the third thread in the last month or so I’ve seen from Exeter City fans fed up that the local newspaper – the Express and Echo – still only posts up a teaser for their stories as opposed to the full article (usually a couple of paragraphs followed by the words ‘for the full story, see x day’s paper’).

The refusal to post full articles online is frustrating and it’s understandable that readers – especially Exeter exiles like myself who don’t have the option of buying the paper – are removing the Echo from their favourites site.

It’s also a shame. As a City fan, the Echo is a great resource for keeping up to date with news from the club. They also, unlike many counterparts, have a good website and a decent editorial standard applied to videos on the site (bar the player occasionally not working in Firefox). They’ve moved on vastly from the old approach of dumping any old video stuff and a good portion of their work is as good as some local TV journalism.

Which makes it even more maddening that users can’t access news stories on the day they’re published. It’s an incredibly short-sighted move, and one I’ve not seen any other local paper do (although that’s not saying others don’t).Can you imagine a national or large regional paper adopting the same attitude?

More to the point, their sister paper, the Western Morning News, puts up news articles in full and probably steals away a fair few online readers.

One of the contributors on the original thread fairly asks why the paper should put on online content for free when they’ve got a paper to sell. There’s a couple of simple answers here though.

Firstly, the news is available elsewhere, if you’re prepared to look for it. If I can access the story now or wait a day for a slightly more detailed report, I’ll probably take the one today. By waiting a day, the site loses out on potential readers.

Secondly, those who buy the paper are not necessarily going to be the same people reading the site online. If you’ve brought a copy of the paper, there is less incentive to go online. There is a decent amount of material to tempt the paper-buying reader onto the website, but it’s unlikely they’ll want to re-read the stories unless they have a pressing urge to comment on them.

In contrast, the web readers need an incentive to read online, and if they can’t read the news when they want to, they’ll as likely go elsewhere and not come back. As seems to be happening, judging by comments on Exeweb.

So, by taking the decision to delay the content for the sake of newspaper sales, the paper could be scoring an own goal, firstly by sending web-readers into the arms of rival papers. And with newspaper readerships declining, if the Echo tries to win back readers by opening up content online, they may find online-only readers have already gone elsewhere.

I’ve already got plenty of Devon-related feeds in my RSS reader to keep up with news from home. I can even get my Exeter City news direct from the club via Facebook updates. In short, I don’t actually need the Echo, but the Echo needs online readers like me.

As I’ve said – I do like the Echo’s website and want to read what’s going on in my hometown. But if I can’t access it on the day, then I, and others, will simply give up. And that would be a shame, give the quality of the writing and the website.

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: Exeter, Exeter City, Express and Echo, online news, RSS

Now the dust’s settled both around Giraffe restaurant in Exeter and in the general world of breaking news, and yesterday’s events are becoming clearer, it’s interesting to see how the coverage of the event has also settled down both for traditional media and more Web 2.0 sources.

While yesterday the best sources for breaking news were the online Exeter City fans forum Exeweb, and Twitter, today things have settled down somewhat. The thread on Exeweb has slowed and hasn’t been updated in a while, while Tweets on the issue have been restricted to those from traditional media accounts like ITN and the Guardian [1].

Likewise, Technorati and del.icio.us have sporadic entries, but nothing traditional media hasn’t already told me.

[A quick aside here - partly to blow my own trumpet, but partly because it fits in well here - POLIS director Charlie Beckett followed up his very nice comment with a blog post praising what I wrote yesterday, which is as unexpected as it is flattering (and humbling). But where did Charlie find my piece? Via his colleague on del.icio.us. QED.]

But where it gets really interesting is Digg. If you search upcoming stories for Exeter then the majority of articles ‘Dugg’ are from traditional sources: the BBC, the Telegraph, etc. [2].

Now, I’ll admit this has only been a cursory glance and any research I’ve done hasn’t been as thorough as yesterday but there’s still a few strands of hypothesis we can draw from this.

The main point being, when you have a breaking news story, traditional media is a lot slower than online sources and social media tool and, in many cases, less reliable. This also suggests that people are moving towards these tools rather than more traditional sources when they want to find out more information.

However, once the story moves beyond it’s initial ‘breaking’ stage (usually 24 hours, or an overnight gap), traditional media reasserts itself. The posters on Exeweb or Twitterers are likely to have the time or access to compete with media outlets, so at this stage the fastest, most reliable sources online will revert to the familiar brand names. They have the lines to the police, they eyewitnesses, and the politicians and now can be seen to be across the story.

The big loser in all this now is not social media, which can happily exist outside of the mainstream media and isn’t solely news-orientated, but the Express and Echo, Exeter’s local paper.

Yes, the Echo have continued to add updates to their site, but I still can’t read today’s coverage, which is maddening – the message to buy the paper for full information has been on the site since they posted a brief summary of their lead story, and they’re already telling us to buy Saturday’s paper for the update. Which would be great if I still lived in Devon, but I don’t.

Now, the Express and Echo may well have some of the best journalistic coverage on this topic, and today and tomorrow’s papers may well be ground-breaking award-winning stuff, but it’s really too late. Any smart reader, Exonian or otherwise, will have gone to somewhere like Google News, done a search for Exeter and read a lot of the pieces available there, most of which contain not just yesterday’s story but up-to-the-minute articles with today’s events (the Telegraph’s is particularly good). In the meantime, the Echo sits with none of this.

Taking this logically to its conclusion, why would I – the online reader – then need to buy tomorrow’s Express and Echo or visit it’s website when I know there is better information elsewhere? In looking to maximise the paper sales, the Echo could potentially lose out on readers both on and offline.

[By the way, if you want to contact me with any links or aspects of this online case study I may have missed, or anything that may be interesting or relevant to the blog or, for whatever reason, you don't want to leave a comment, there's a contact form on the About Me page.]

[1] Assuming you can actually get onto Twitter – it’s having another bit of downtime/crash. Honestly, it’s more tempramental than all of my ex-girlfriends morphed into one.

[2] Anti-fascist campaigners may want to note the amount of Diggs BNP links are getting (and on Technorati as well).

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: del.icio.us, Exeter, Exeter bomb, Exeter explosion, Exeweb, Express and Echo, journalism, online journalism, social media, Twitter, Web 2.0

It terms of the unexpected, getting several tweets and rss notifications of a bomb blast of my home city of Exeter had to be pretty high on the list of things I never quite thought I’d see [1]. As, until just under eight months ago, it was also my reporting patch, it also gave the opportunity to follow the story from a variety of sources, analyse coverage, and see what, if any opportunities had been taken or missed online, and with social media.

It also made me a teeny bit jealous and nostalgic that I wasn’t down there reporting.

Breaking news: the sources

While the story was continually breaking I was hitting Twitter, Digg, technorati, Google and the local media’s online site, chiefly the Express and Echo and Gemini Radio. Anything that follows certainly isn’t a criticism of them (in terms of Gemini, my old employer, they sounded fantastic on-air from the hour I listened in on, and given how few people there were in the newsroom, they were stretched as hell. I’ve no idea on the echo, but I’d imagine they were also juggling plenty of balls with not enough hands).

How web 2.0 savvy were the journalists on the case? I have no idea, but through a cursory glance of various social media sites I dug up a few bits and pieces, which would have been a good addition to any story, and maybe worth storing for another angle or another good voice to the story.

Digg didn’t yield anything [2] while delicious didn’t immediately have anything either and technorati only really came alive between leaving work at six and logging on again at 10pm, although a lot of the posts were from the usual anti-Muslim brigade. It did, however, yield this lovely and rather sweet piece of user-generated content:

“I contacted Gemini radio to tell them about the Exeter City Council webcam, and they put the link on their website!”

The tool that really proved it’s worth, though, was Twitter. Not only was this the first place I heard about the story itself, but there were rich pickings, with a quick search within Twitter for ‘Exeter’ bringing several users Tweeting about their experiences, as well as a couple of interesting blog posts. John Hood, who was one of them, also noted Twitter’s worth:

“This afternoon, Twitter, yet again, proved its intrinsic value with regards ‘breaking news’, when a nail bomb exploded at Exeter’s Princesshay Shopping Centre! I had, literally, only driven by Princesshay minutes prior to the explosion. Wondering if Peter Lacey, an eye witness interviewed by the BBC at Princesshay, is the same Peter I knew at primary school? Small world if it is!”

And in more proof, if any were needed, of the high proportion of the social media enthusiasts on Twitter, the search also uncovered The Daily Ack’s brief unfolding timeline of his personal experiences, plus another piece of wood for the traditional media coffin [3] notes:

“I’d expect that over the next few hours, just like the 2005 blasts, I’ll also be getting most of my news from non-mainstream sources. However unlike the 2005 bombing this, unless it turns out that the initial information is very wrong, is a local story and that means that, unlike a story of national interest, any follow up by the main stream press will be sporadic at best. They’ll probably not just be the best news source, they might be the only news source available.”

But, perhaps surprisingly (or not – I wasn’t), the first place I looked was the best. Exeter City’s fan forum, Exeweb, has a very strong Exeter-based community and, to my mind, it was inevitable that somebody would start a thread about it.

Many of the posters worked nearby the city centre, and some were close to the main scene – the thread actually turned out to be the best way to follow the news, with any unsubstantianed rumours quickly quashed and the news hitting Exeweb before anywhere else, even Twitter.

Now, before you think I spent the whole afternoon scouring the web for sources, the above all took me just half an hour to set up. Once I’d found the right areas to look in, the rest was done with Google and Technorati alerts and refreshing the other pages when I got a spare moment. That, to me, is the exciting part. The web has moved journalism on to such a point that with just 30 minutes I felt as informed as if I’d been living in Exeter.

The traditional media, online

Now, putting aside social media for a moment and onto the local media, specifically the Express and Echo [4], the fascinating area was to see firstly how their website covered the event, and secondly, what opportunities could have been used to link into social media and enhance the user experience.

There was some good stuff too – regular half hour updates, and a gallery that was uploaded pretty quickly and continually added to. The video that was posted later tied all the ends together nicely and was one of the most informative pieces available anywhere on the web all day [5].

On a basic level, very good. As a user, I have a reason to visit their site throughout the day. However, there’s aspects that are far from perfect. The bitty nature of the articles is quite frustrating. Also, every piece is finished with a plug for tomorrow’s echo, where the full story will appear.

Now, as a regular user of the paper’s online service to keep up to date with events back home, I’m willing to bet tomorrow will see what the Echo do every day – a brief summary, followed by a quick line about full story in the paper, before the full piece is posted up a day later. As somebody who can’t get hold of the paper on that day, it drives me nuts [6] and is really poor practice, plus puts them 24 hours behind when it comes to social bookmarking, and that will lose them hits in the long term.

It’s easy to understand why they do this – to maximise print sales – but is a very Web 1.0 way of doing things and with no sharing buttons, it’s very frustrating to ‘do’ anything with the articles. It’s still possible to hold back the really good stuff for the paper while filling the the essentials in a good, non-bitty article online as it breaks. If they could open up and make all their articles available on the day, it would help web goodwill towards them no end.

Going Web 2.0 and combining traditional and new media

Now, let’s bring together a few strands from both here. The Echo’s online coverage was ok to good in places but could have enhanced the user experience far more. The most obvious idea here would be rather than posting the bitty updates, would be to have a reporter liveblogging and bringing all the strands together. The Guardian are particularly good at this, and its an easy and coherent read, and this could apply equally the Gemini’s site.

The same reporter would be able to scour the web for any decent links, blogs, or Tweets and link to them as appropriate, plus there would be the chance to work from any tip-offs that might arise in the comments [6]. The question will always arise here at what level do you credit blogs as sources, and how reliable are they, which is something Robin Hamman has written about many times [7].

It’s a toughie, but blogs do add and enhance, and are part of the liveblogging experience. Best practice would suggest that if, as a journalist, the information isn’t immediately verifiable, but worth linking too, then flag up this fact in the liveblog before you link. That should cover it all. Perhaps another option would be to save it to delicious and publish all the saved delicious links on the blog at the end of the day.

Local papers are usually the first, and best place, to turn to when there’s an event on their patch that’s of national interest, due to good local knowledge and contacts, and the really savvy local media (papers and radio) would already have a Twitter feed in place – it’s at times like this that Twitter really can release its potential (and generate more traffic for your site).

It goes without saying that any good reporter should be setting up technorati and Google alerts relevant to a story like this, while also checking for information on Facebook, and the more Web 2.0 of them will have thoughts about putting the videos on YouTube and working the links and tags on Digg and delicious, even if it means bookmarking the paper’s own liveblog as a start.

How much the newspaper or radio’s site wants to share with users, or keep for themselves, is another matter, but both visible or just used by the journalist, they all combine to enhance the user experience, without a great deal of effort from the person sat in front of the keyboard.

Conclusion

The more events like this occur, the more opportunities and tools your average reader will have to hunt down information. Twitter is becoming more useful as a journalistic tool by the day, and once again showed its worth here.

What this also shows, is that any traditional media that ignores these social media tools and neglects the user experience throughout breaking news, risks losing them elsewhere, possibly for good. After all, if there up to date information on forums and blogs that’s seemingly no less reliable than the mainstream media, why bother? But if the paper or radio in question starts bringing together these tools on their website – ah, now that’s a different story.

One place they could do a lot worse than take a lead from is the Birmingham Post (even if they do have one of my least favourite journalist-only words – slammed- in their front page headline), who’ve done some excellent work across the site (thanks, in no small part, I suspect, to Joanna Geary). I’d wager if the same event happened in Birmingham, the Post’s online coverage would exceed my suggestions.

The Echo haven’t done a bad job online, that’s for sure – with a little bit of tweaking they could really take their Web 1.5 site to Web 2.0. The same goes for Gemini, who do offer extras, but (and this is largely because all GCap sites are the same and not great for anything unique to one specific station) really need to add in lots more Web 2.0 features (hell, why not do a special news podcast?).

But the encouraging thing is they’re getting there. Even is social media is still hurtling forward at a faster pace.

UPDATE: And proof, if any were needed, about the importance of good tagging and titling. This post alone has seen nearly 200% more hits and counting than an average post on this blog. And this blog is now also on the front page of Google if you search for ‘Exeter bomb’. Now how many media organisations would love to see their coverage listed on the first set of results on Google?

UPDATE 2: With wonderful gallows humour the British do so well, there’s now a Facebook Group, I survived the 22/05/08 Exeter bombing.

[1] And even so, the general consensus from friends and online sources seems to be one nutter who’d probably have done more damage with a baseball bat than a bomb, and doesn’t seem to have affected people that much. But that’s by the by.

[2] And I’m still not really au fait with getting the best out of Digg so if anybody has found anything that I’ve missed feel free to tell me I’m rubbish.

[3] Ok, I’m not a total subscriber to the “I come not to praise newspapers but bury them” crowd but it does show that users are getting more savvy and much of traditional media needs to shake up PDQ.

[4] I’m going to put Gemini very much to one side here – partly because they would have been working towards regular on-air updates, and also I know what their online CMS is like – an absolute inflexible dog that doesn’t offer a great deal of scope for experimentation, and that’s really not their fault. There’s plenty of extra audio for you to get their teeth into though, which is good, and they’re updating regularly (in between me starting this post and writing this. I can guess which poor sod it is who won’t be sleeping tonight, and will buy him a pint when I’m next in Exeter).

[5] And I’ll even put aside my usual quibbles about editing and other TV techniques here as it was a very decent video and, given the time they had to do it in, well put together – certainly better in content than a lot of the sensationalist crap on the national bulletins.

[6] The Echo do have a note on their site that comments are disabled due to abuse, which is fair enough if they’re stretched – comment moderation takes up a bit of time and in events like this you do get a fair share of nutters leaving comments. I’ve no idea what caused them to switch it off though, as it was already disabled by the time I logged onto their site.

[7] If he’s reading this, Robin, I’d love to know your thoughts.

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: Birmingham Post, blogs, breaking news, del.icio.us, Digg, Exeter, Exeter bomb, Exeter explosion, Exeweb, Express and Echo, Gemini FM, Giraffe, Giraffe explosion, online news, Princesshay, social media, Technorati, Twitter