This is a big thank you to all correspondents, lead correspondent, desk heads, sub editors, editors and everyone else involved in writing articles for our customers. For the third month running our “negative editorial actions” i.e. errors, are down.
They have reduced the percentage of errors from 0.645% of articles containing an error in July to 0.632% of articles containing an error in August. In real terms this means one error in every 158 articles, which is a great achievement.
Editorial quality is obviously key to any news agency and of course no one gets it perfect. How many of you see errors in the Metro on a daily basis? Or the BBC website, especially over the weekend? There is no industry standard for this and no agency ever seems to want to stick their head above the parapet and say we have ‘x’ or ’y’ error rate.
For example this article posted on the BBC I came across this morning about the London paper closing http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/8262303.stm. Im sure it should read “News International” not “New International” as published. I love the BBC but it is still run by humans.
So without this we can only go by our “rule of thumb” and I would be interested to see how many of you reading this truly believe they could read 158 articles on the BBC website, Metro, or just about any other publication without noticing an error?!
For the cynical people out there reading this blog and probably quite rightly pointing out a huge array of errors in it (it’s a good job I don’t work in our editorial department!), then I refer you back to the opening article and disclaimer in it. So to finish with one of my favourite quotes from Mark Twain “I despise a man who can only spell a word one way”.
Friday, 18 September 2009
Thursday, 17 September 2009
Adfero Autumn
Role on Autumn – This may not be a popular season for the masses but it’s an end to the summer slog for stories. As im sure your aware parliament shuts from July 22nd to the last week in August meaning real top level stories are rarer than rocking horse.... “footprints”. Sorry to everyone involved in stories over the summer but are A levels really getting so much easier each year they deserve front page headlines each and every year? Or is this just a media symptom of MP’s holidaying.
Like the Mp’s mentioned above I am back from my holidays and ready to Blog again! In fact straight back in to conference season. Adfero will be attending everything from Ad:tech to the conservative party conference, how will we keep track of everything happening all at once? Well reading about the CPC it came to light – through social media – especially Twitter.
This year there will be a special squad of 'Twit ambassadors' whose job is to provide the discussions in real-time to attendee’s who sign-up to the service, meaning you, I or David Cameron won’t miss a moment of Alan Duncan’s verbal eloquence.
I think it will be very interesting to see how the parties use social networking during these events, especially with the sound bite nature of twitter allowing only 140 characters. It should allow parties to transfer more policies to a wider audience.
Will this catch on? Will Lobby groups etc produce twitifesto’s – kind of twitter friendly manifesto that are no more than 140 characters? At Adfero we have been working with our opinion makers to produce 3 minute video manifesto’s and it seems really effective in gaining public backing. What we are finding is it seems a lot less “intimidating” to watch a 3 min video rather than wade through a full manifesto and the consensus is that this is making their manifestos available to a wider audience.
As a nation we are experiencing a collective decreasing span of attention? We want the info we want, when we want it, and summarised. Perhaps readers digest should get ready for a boom!
Like the Mp’s mentioned above I am back from my holidays and ready to Blog again! In fact straight back in to conference season. Adfero will be attending everything from Ad:tech to the conservative party conference, how will we keep track of everything happening all at once? Well reading about the CPC it came to light – through social media – especially Twitter.
This year there will be a special squad of 'Twit ambassadors' whose job is to provide the discussions in real-time to attendee’s who sign-up to the service, meaning you, I or David Cameron won’t miss a moment of Alan Duncan’s verbal eloquence.
I think it will be very interesting to see how the parties use social networking during these events, especially with the sound bite nature of twitter allowing only 140 characters. It should allow parties to transfer more policies to a wider audience.
Will this catch on? Will Lobby groups etc produce twitifesto’s – kind of twitter friendly manifesto that are no more than 140 characters? At Adfero we have been working with our opinion makers to produce 3 minute video manifesto’s and it seems really effective in gaining public backing. What we are finding is it seems a lot less “intimidating” to watch a 3 min video rather than wade through a full manifesto and the consensus is that this is making their manifestos available to a wider audience.
As a nation we are experiencing a collective decreasing span of attention? We want the info we want, when we want it, and summarised. Perhaps readers digest should get ready for a boom!
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