links for 2010-12-02

Stop listening to Newspaper people.

We have had nearly 15 years to figure out the Web and as an industry we newspaper people are no good at it. No good at it at all.

Want to get good at it?

Then stop listening to the Newspaper people and start listening to the rest of the world.

And, I would point out, as we have done at JRC – put the Digital people in charge – of everything.

Find new voices and let them push you around.

We have established an Advisory Board to do just that.

Jarvis, Rosen, Bell and Morgan push us hard on our thinking and we are the better for it.

We are getting out of anything that does not fall into our core competencies of content creation and the selling of our audience to advertisers. Get rid of the bricks and iron [and] focus on core competencies — meaning, get rid of those things that don’t add value to the business. Reduce it or stop it. Outsource it or sell it.

Slideshare presentation which provides good summary of hyperlocal publishing to date.

He focused on building up a community not just a blog – Paul had already constructed a database of Liverpool FC fans who liked his content and were sympathetic to what he was doing. Many of these became his first subscribers. Paul has nurtured that community by constantly engaging with them.

In other words, Ofcom will factor in any online local media operators, when considering whether there is sufficient competition to two merging parties.

Harries said they were not purposefully excluding our website from the news conference but suggested “it may be that we don’t know you”.

For the first time I have to use Open Office’s spreadsheet software, which turns out to be not too bad. The data pilot tool is a worthy free alternative to Excel’s pivot tables, allowing journalists to quickly aggregate & interrogate a large dataset.

Formulae like concatenate and ISNA turn out to be particularly useful in cleaning up data or making it compatible with similar datasets.

The ‘Text to columns’ function comes in handy in breaking up full names into title, forename and surname (or addresses into constituent parts), while find and replace helped in removing redundant information.