Since I heard it would be a required part of the course, I had always though of doing my niche blog on devolved politics. I’m generally interested in the topic after studying it in my first degree, and originally my … Continue reading →
Though traditionally a Labour stronghold, the fate of one of Welsh politics’ rising stars rests on the outcome of the seat.
Labour’s Vaughan Gething will face off against Plaid’s Liz Musa, the Conservatives’ Ben Gray and the Lideral Democrats’ Sian Anne Cliff in the election in May.
Labour candidate Vaughan Gething
Gething, previously a president of the Trades Union Congress in Wales, is a trade union lawyer from Thompsons solicitors. He was a councillor in the Butetown ward of the constituency before losing his seat in the last local elections. Observers will be watching closely to see Labour’s results in the area.
Gething started off his political career as the President of the National Union of Students in Wales. He then became an active trade unionist with GMB and UNITE, and was the Welsh TUC’s first black President. Also in his impressive political CV is chairmanship of the Right to Vote campaign, which sought to engage black and ethnic minority voters in Welsh political life, and a stint as the current AM’s research and press officer.
I spoke with him as he was delivering leaflets in St Mellons introducing himself to voters. He says voters in the area are angry at Lib Dem broken promises over tuition fees and a controversial plan to build over the Rumney Rec green space in Llanrumney. He has also argued for the need for more social housing.
His leaflets say ‘Only Labour can beat the Tories here’, with the area’s MP Alun Michael saying ‘a vote for the Liberal Democrats or Plaid Cymru in Cardiff South and Penarth is a vote for the Tories.’
He said: “I wanted to be a Labour member for a few years now…. I thought our country could and should be a better place. It was social justice, I wanted to see a fairer and better community and country.” He also spoke of the contribution devolution had made to Wales over the past 12 years.
He remembers Conservatve candidate Ben Gray from his days in the NUS, where Gray was also active. Gray is now a Student Liason Officer at the University of Wales, and there is a great podcast from the University on his background here.
The Liberal Democrats have come under increased scrutiny recently, with the vote in Westminster on tuition fees proving bitterly divisive.
The Lib Dems’ candidate in Cardiff South and Penarth is Sian Anne Cliff, a keen local campaigner. Sian works in the Welsh Assembly as a researcher for the Lib Dems, and living in Splott means like Vaughan she stays inside the constituency.
I caught up with Sian as she was leafletting in the upmarket Cardiff Bay area around the Assembly. She’s been delivering letters asking residents to take part in BT’s ‘Race to Infinity’ competition, where if enough residents write to BT their phone exchange will be upgraded to one ready for ‘superfast’ broadband.
Sian said: “I think it will be a difficult campaign for every political party. It has been a tough economic time recently, and everyone is feeling the effects of it. But I do think that we are making positive differences in government in the UK at the moment, and we need to get that message out to people about the effects we are having and the positve changes we are making to people’s lives here in Wales.”
The sitting AM, Lorraine Barret, is standing down from politics to become a secular celebrant. She enjoys a generally good reputation in the constituency, and her successor will have big boots to fill.
With such a large and diverse constituency of around 70,000 people, the campaign will likely be a gruelling one for all involved next year.
Credit to the Times’ online Communities editor, she could have easily made her lecture a ‘don’t talk about the paywall’ affair. Fortunately after an engaging lecture on how newspapers can build and maintain online communities (worth a post in itself, but I think I’ll focus on the money question here) Joanna Geary was willing to take questions on ‘Uncle’ Rupert’s great experiment in monetisation, and there were plenty of them.
There are certain parts of her answers I can’t divulge openly, but she stressed that a key part of the strategy in bringing people behind the paywall was sharing links on social media. I lost count of the number of times she brought up the slide for that.
She’s delighted that the Times has taken this huge leap rather than having the industry remain as a ‘monoculture.’ Overall I got the impression that the Times paywall was put into place despite the editors knowing full well the enourmous risks it presented. It’s been a bold move, though wether it will pay off or not remains to be seen.
Rory Cellan-Jones has seen a lot of change in his 25 years in the TV industry. As he told us about the advent of breakfast TV and showed us title tiles from BBC Breakfast Time it was astonishing to see how much the medium, and hair styles, have changed.
He highlighted the main difference between audiences in th 1970s and the audiences of today: interactivity. While 70s audiences were happy to be passive recipients of news and programming, today’s one’s can’t go one series of Top Gear with pressing a red button, commenting on the website or phoning in to complain.
This has its upsides in TV makers getting a better idea of what their audiences want, but the downside is that it takes the focus away from original journalism. “There is still not enough original journalism today” the BBC technology correspondant said.
One interesting thing I learned was that Rory’s 50meg broadband package (which BT probably has to provide to the BBC’s tech correspondant by royal charter) still can’t match his old ISDN line for speed. As The Apprentice stuttered it’s way fram-by-fram across my laptop last night, I couldn’t help but despair.
Adam Tinworth has plenty to brag about. Not only does he have perhaps the coolest blog name in the bloggerverse, he has the formula for making money from online content.
Adam, of trade magazine group RBI, used plenty of interesting graphs and diagrams to describe the way to success. While it’s relatively easy to build up a readership based on the journalistic side of a magazine’s website, it’s getting users to pay for the content that’s the tricky part.
‘Paywall’ has become almost a swear word in online journalism, but it isn’t necessarily an anathema to a publications’ online content.
The infamous Times paywall, which announced recently that it had 105,000 customers, was discussed at great length. This figure shouldn’t be taken at face value, as it essentially double-counts subscriptions from iPad users etc.
Though special interest magazines can go about this in a different way. People in a certain niche will be more willing to pay for specialised information than, say, the general readership of a newspaper. This may help out some trade magazines, but luring people in with certain amounts of general journalism is not necessarily a sustainable option.
If nothing else, I am now a semi-expert on the Trent 900 engine, the (allegedly) faulty jet that failed onboard a Quatas superjumbo, sending Rolls Toyce hares tumbling. This was because of Adam’s story of Jon Ostrower, a Flightblogger whose technical know-how earned him a huge readership from the aviation enthusiast community.
This led to me reading a few of his posts, and entertaining many people at a party with a long detailed discussion of the possible causes of the failure. Long live niche blogging!
We all want to be at the top of those Google search pages. There’s probably a small part of all of us that considers our blogs or websites to be inherently better than all the junk appearing below it on a Google search.
It might be a bit glib, but SEO is still an essential skill to pick up for any online media site. Our course tutor Glyn Mottershead gave us a crash course in how to optimise our content for search engines, which I’ve summarised here briefly.
Only the first 25 words of an intro matter to Google’s spider, and like good journalistic practise, it helps if they are clear, concise, and spelled accurately.
Where SEO breaks from standard good practise is the choice of some of the words. Here you might have to change a word you’d normally use to one that people are likely to search for. For example, a headline nd intro about the sinking of the Belgrano would do well to include the words ‘Belgrano’, ‘Falklands’, ‘submarine’, etc. ‘Gotcha’ probably wouldn’t work…
Avoiding Black Hat SEO is also a good call. This involves sticking searched for phrases like NAKED, LOHAN or POKER in prominent places purely for the search value. Why it’s called Black Hat, I don’t know.
Categories and tags also need to be deftly manipulated, and I get the impression only time will tell which words tend to work out best for each individual blog or site. I’m pretty sure I’ve done a half-hearted job at best at optimising this entry…
