Friday round-up: Learning from (others') experience

"Mood swings that would make a crystal meth addict blink in disbelief"

That was just one of the side-effects of setting up the Caledonian Mercury online, says Editor Stewart Kirkpatrick (pictured) on the blog allmediascotland.

18 hour days, seven days a week was what it took to launch what the CM team describe as "The Economist meets the Huffington Post drinking Irn Bru.”

But the hard work has seemingly paid off. He writes: "Since we launched in January, more than 700,000 people have visited the site, looking at more than 1.5million pages. We have more than 1600 fans on both Facebook and Twitter.

"We're cracking the advertising nut and while our committed team of writers have had to be patient at times, we have started to pay them a decent amount."

(Link via Jon Slattery)

More from the BBC

Content Management Systems can be the bane of an online journalist's life, as notes Adam Tinworth.

He has highlighted a blog by the BBC Online team, that he says makes for fascinating reading, on how they've developed their publishing system.

The new version, they write, underpins the new News site and has made substantial changes to systems and workflow, but it is still focused on the task of managing content which fits into a general journalistic pattern. It does not try to be all things to all people, and this in no doubt plays some part in its success.

A more in-depth blog post on all its bells and whistles is in the offing, but you can see a good overview of the more structured approach they've taken to making it all work - and work well.

And finally, the obvious...

Journalism graduates - like you didn't know finding a job was going to be difficult enough, Deb Wenger, on the Advancing the Story blog, has produced a quick checklist of what a modern graduate needs to have a hope in hell of getting their toe through the door.

It's no good just having a journalism degree - your qualification needs to cover all bases now. And whilst some of the tips only apply to US graduates, there are some other obvious ones - like work experience, basic web publication skills as well as an entrepreneurial attitude.

It may all sound like the ABC of modern journalism but it's still good to consider your own skills set and ask the question - do you measure up?

Lessons we can learn from the BBC's election coverage

Covering a major news event like an election can be tricky – how do you keep audiences engaged with a story that stretches over several weeks?

In what Alfred Hermida describes as a “brief but fascinating insight” into his research, Einar Thorsen of Bournemouth University, UK, was made a presentation at the IAMCR 2010 in Braga of his examination of the relationship between BBC online journalism and citizenship during the 2005 and 2010 UK General Elections.

In a quick presentation, reports Hermida, Thorsen explained how civic engagement as a key of the BBC mandate reflected in its election coverage online, with them taking a less fragmented approach in 2010 than their 2005 output.

According to Thornsen, with research showing that audiences were oblivious to original features online, the BBC made it a key aim to distinguish between web and broadcast output.

Another issue was a strategic discussion of how the BBC covered politics online in an attempt to attract more people to politics.

Thorsen showed a BBC live updates page, incorporating reports from BBC journalists, user emails and tweets. But it was based on a manual process, with an individual cutting and pasting bits of HTML content into a static page.

Everything was verified and checked by a second pair of eyes, said Thorsen, usually a person looking over a journalist’s shoulder.

The BBC also outsourced the moderation of comments, allowing them to monitor the debate online to select and highlight some comments.

Thorsen’s research also revealed that some journalists still have doubts over the value of user-generated content (UGC).

He found in some BBC journalists that some described UGC and comments as an example of civic engagement online, while other described it as “utter s**t” and “a complete waste of time”.

Study: Online and Social media boosted coverage of General Election

The televised leaders’ debates may have been the main talking point of the 2010 General Election but a new study highlighted by journalism.co.uk suggests that mainstream coverage was “enriched” by the use of online and social media.

The report, 'UK election 2010: mainstream media and the role of the internet: how social and digital media affected the business of politics and journalism', written by the co-founder of the BBC News website Nic Newman is the result of interviews conducted with more than 20 journalists, political bloggers and founders of political websites.

In a release to mark today’s launch of the report, Newman states how the results show that Twitter in particular has become a "core communication tool" in political and media circles.

With more than 600 party political candidates using the service during the election, it became "an essential source of real-time information for journalists and politicians", he says.

The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) also conducted a survey of more than 200 18-24-year-olds, as part of the study, which suggested that "unprecedented levels of participation" with the general election were a result of increased social media coverage.

The use of social media tools by journalists and mainstream news sites, such as liveblogs and digital correspondents, "helped to amplify the impact of social media even further" on this age group, says the study.