Gordon's Republic

Gordon Macmillan

1630 - Josa Young, executive editor of Conde Nast: Says her role has changed little in moving from print to online, because it is all about the user experience. It has to be good, (the content, the interaction, whatever it is).

Conde Nast, she says, will never lose that critical eye, the professionalism that comes via its writers, but at the same time she underscored the point that the company was everywhere on YouTube and on Facebook. Anywhere Conde Nast can engage change.

Pete Clifton, head of news interactive of the BBC: If you want to find Clifton he is tucked away on the seventh floor of the BBC. Says there has to be integration, but the corporation has a way to go. This is despite its huge budget and sprawling investment that is the envy of commercial rivals. Disappointing to hear really, particularly in light of all the phone scandals.

He says it still happens that when big news stories break the first BBC news interactive knows about it is on the TV; reporters are still going overseas and producing nothing for the site.

Things are changing, although the way he put this was that the begging is starting earlier when correspondents are starting to be told (asked/begged to) what the website needs. But clearly a begging culture can not be good.

The BBC even has a unit (since integrated within BBC News) that badgers people to write for the site. This is on top of its own online writers. Progress is obvious. It has had successes from some, but others are simply not interested.

Cited a good example of Andy North, the Baghdad correspondent who did a recent big photo-story online that worked very well. Delivering something that video or words alone could not. Not everyone is embracing digital change at the BBC, that much is clear, which is why for the moment, Clifton says, you have the seventh floor.

However, he says it should, in a few years, be gone and integrated.

Andrew Hawken, editorial director of online at BSkyB, pretty new to Sky, been there a year after joining from MSN.

Sky is in expansion mode. New motoring site (something for Haymarket and Emap to look at) is one that is on the way.

He says that one of the ambitions is to turn Sky News into a true multimedia news room. But what are the consequences?

Well, Hawken says that Sky News is no longer an afterthought. Experienced journalists are coming over to the news site, which is nice as it means the website is getting the cash that previously was only available to the news station.

But while the people move they need new skills as well and new language: Flash, Java, HTML. This means a change in decision making, which means looking at real-time analytics data and making decisions based on that. You just can't do that on TV.

Hawken showed a video of the new Sky News room where online journalists and TV journalists sit together.

Having just listened to Clifton at the BBC it seems that things are moving ahead more swiftly at Sky that at rival the BBC in terms of integration and putting people together in one to provide that seamless organisational structure that in turns creates content that is in tune on TV, in print and online.

Hawken says that some of the new things that Sky is looking at include having reporters filing live by Twitter and using photo site Flickr. Very interesting to see Sky doing this. Shame about all the shouty graphics on screen (that could be just me).

Last night, Sky launched it user-driven news show. 'Sky.com/news'. It kicked off with the top clicked stories of the day. Want to know what it was? The return of the Downing Street cat. That's user-generated content for you. There is definitely a theme here today. Earlier the Sun's Picton spoke about how user-generated content led to Peter Doherty heroin cat story.

Last up today Karl Schneider, editorial development director, Reed Business Information, and former Computer Weekly and New Scientist editor.

Change is the driver and the biggest change in terms of content is the move from traditional content to non traditional; as publishers embrace community interaction and multimedia.

Schneider talked about how Reed was giving its journalists better tools to get content online faster as it looks to a web first model of publishing.

The big mindset change, which is the most important of anything talked about, is that the role of the journalist is no longer just creating content, but pointing to content as well. This could be in a forum, in a blog or a podcast.

He used the example of Farmer's Week using the forums in the recent foot and mouth crisis to get information from their readers, but also to build and develop that story in the forums. They used it to provide a service to readers, passing on tips and the readers reciprocated.

1615 - The panel on social media. What are they going do about it?

In case you are wondering, bingo is the answer. Bingo is very social, Picton had said it has been huge for the Sun. MySpace bingo? They probably have it.

Patrick Fuller from WhatCar? made the point that unlike social media sites, editorial sites are about a number of things that give them character and are about a group of people at (pistonheads, for instance) have come together.

Pickard followed this up saying that the Guardian community comes together because it is about people who have a number of things in common.

But she also made the point that media owners have also have put their hands up to Facebook and embraced it. The listed the groups that Guardian readers had started up online that were Guardianesque, such as Guardian Northerners.

She saw the Guardian embracing those, but at the same time realising that they could not monetise them -- not surprising really, considering how much a piece of Facebook real estate costs.

But looking to the future, I would have thought that Facebook is looking at how it can work with brands/publishers to allow them both to monetise their content and users.

15:45 - First afternoon session Online Collaboration with Meg Pickard, head of communities at Guardian Unlimited, and Pete Picton, editor of the Sun Online, talking about MySun and... Kelvin MacKenzie Online?

Picton said that the big debate at the Sun/News Corp is what kind of publisher are they? Do we lock people in or send them out? Clearly as a publisher the first impulse is to keep them, but it's not easy. Not with aggregators sending people all over the web.

That said, the more News Corp buys, new-media-wise, the more it allows its sites to keep users within one of its domains or another, be that the Sun Online, the New York Post or even, soon to arrive within News Corp, the Wall Street Journal online.

Pickard asked the question is user-generated content "as well as" or "instead of" other content. Seems like another no brainer to me. It has be as well as, but many sites still have not gone very far down this road.

Pickard raised the point about the education process needed for the audience supplying user generated content. They, she said, need to be told how to act and what to and what not to do.

Coupled with this, she said, was the changing world that journalists face. She talked about how journalists have to learn those new skills as well, as their content comes up against that user-generated content, because professional journalists find themselves competing more and more with the amateur or "citizen journalists", but journalists have to deal with that instant criticism.

She said she could see, particularly in terms of video, that the paper could find itself leading on user-generated content. If we look at Burma and the blogs and video coming out of there, it is already happening. "Witnessing experience" is one way of describing it Pickard said.

Peter Bale from MSN asked about moderation in terms of libel and defamation (The Guardian had a recent case of anti-Semitic comments posted about writers)

Pickard said the Guardian had tackled this by having people in several countries to ensure that there is round o'clock coverage.

She raised an example of a user who, having seen something, did not tell the Guardian until a day later when the offending comment was still there. She said that it was another example of the responsibility the community had to act. Bit lame really, if you have an offensive comment online for 37 hours someone should have noticed. Clearly she has shaken things up since she joined six months ago.

Picton said the Sun has 35 round moderators working around the clock (but unpaid).

15:15 - Pete Picton, editor of the Sun Online. Talking about user-generated content. Picton spoke about how The Sun has dealt with its readers and getting them involved with the Sun Online a year on from the launch of MySun.

The Sun has always had the advantage of readers who are always writing and letting the paper know what they think. That obviously has dangers as well as plusses, but with MySun (the Sun's take on sibling MySpace) it has hit the spot and, a year on, it has been a major success putting it far ahead of its tabloid rivals online.

The content is coming, but it is not just blogs and forums. Picton pointed to big stories that had come to the paper via MySun including the cracker of Peter Doherty's dog's on crack.

Next up and, you heard it heard first, is Kelvin MacKenzie online. No more details, but the former Sun editor is going into the site and being exposed to the paper's readers. Is that a good thing?

15:00 - Online collaboration, Meg Pickard, head of communities at Guardian Unlimited.

Pickard talked about four stages of online collaboration, but makes a good point in saying that the act of consumption, contribution, curation and creation.

1. The consumption is obvious. The publisher creates, and the public reads. But it is getting less obvious as reading is now an act of creation in itself, because it affects the way information is presented, for example by pushing it up most read lists.

2. Contribution - That's easy. Buzz word central: Users submit their material to the wider product - "user generated content.

3. Curation: User-curated content is when users tag or recommend items, or annotation of sources. She focused on user curated content, which is not something I'd much come across. By that she mean the social data interplay. People engaging with our content. This could be people recommending it to others, rating it or putting it on Delicious.

It allows passionate people to become evangelists. She pointed to mash-ups as another example where content is brought together.

Lists is another. Shortlist could be on to something. She pointed to Amazon's recommends list (one of the earliest examples of user-generated content).

4. Creation. Finally, a very high-level of behaviour. Creation can happen in a number of different orders.

What this means is the publisher does not necessarily dictate the order of things and instead users do via their interactions.

Pickard says that it all suggests that context (the format/interest group/people) is king rather than content. Content instead becomes part of a contextual experience.

Moving onto the holy trinity of community development she listed: Human solutions, technical solutions and editorial solutions.

For publishers, the editorial element of this trinity is key: How do you manage it? How do you interact with it?

13:10 - Now for Duncan Edwards, chief executive of The National Magazine Company, who says that the company has a raft of investment and launches planned in the coming months with Cosmo sites, Harper's Bazaar and All About You.

He admits that the company sat on the sidelines between 2000 and 2005, then after reviewing its decision about not taking part, it started to invest as it became cheaper to get online and the digital ad market started to really take off.

Although he says that the company did not regret not taking part online in those five years, but since deciding to invest online it is now pouring a lot of money in. But it is doing this selectively following a review that began in spring. Edwards says they had to answer the question of where could they put their resources?

The answer was that not every magazine was going to get its own sites because clearly some were better suited than others. It's a no brainer. In the end, it went for five existing properties including Runners World, which has been a real success for NatMags, particularly as an online community.

Harper's Bazaar is on the way and it will use the infrastructure of Handbag. Bazaar is planned to launch before the end of the year.

NatMags is working on a new Cosmo site for next year, in association with Hearst in New York. It will also use content ideas from HandBag.

It is planning to relaunch All About You as a portal for women aged 35-plus. It will include content from Prima, House Beautiful, She, Good Housekeeping and Coast, which will have their own mini sites.

The rest of its investment going into its pure play online brands like Netdoctor and its powerhouse online women's brand Handbag.com, which has spun out things like MyHandbag, the social media part of the women's site. Handbag TV will follow in October.

Edwards went onto say that in terms of online ads, there does not appear, in the case of display ads, to have been a big loser. Maybe he says a reallocation of spend (isn't that a loser?).

Editorially, he says the print journalists are spending a lot of time online in the forums. I bet that's true for mags like Prima, but less true of the likes of Bazaar.

Interesting, content dropped from magazines like Prima, like dress patterns, is now coming back online.

What it all says is that the relationship with consumers in terms of community is vital.

12:30 - Next up, as part of the Beyond the Banner session, is Unilever's digital and new media marketing director, Caroline Slootweg, who has been behind some very innovative developments at Unilever.

Slootweg says the challenge is to push mostly conservative brand teams to innovate.

She says there has been a real shift among advertisers in the past year. She admits though that they were late to the game.

For Unilever, digital she says was always just an aside. A "sitelet". It has to be bigger she says and really support the brand -- continued presence.

Unilever is starting to innovate in new areas such as gaming. Casual gaming is huge for women (check the Wii) and Unilever tapping into that.

She points to innovation with Dove and allowing women to create their own 30 second spots and upload them.

Breaking out of the confines of digital. Digital, she says makes people anxious and it makes them think they need to know lots of stuff when they don't.

"I banned, six months ago, the term website." Instead, she says, brand teams need to think what they wanted to do -- not about a website.

Case study: Suave

"The web is inherently female: socialising, chatting, shopping. That is what all the new innovations are about MySpace and Facebook.

"Mommy blogging" is another phenomenon she points to. Women are at home and many are blogging. Unilever took advantage of this in a really interesting way with its 'In the Motherhood' webisode series.

'In the Motherhood' was created for the Suave shampoo brand an was an online series about moms. It starred a name actress, Leah Remini, and was based on moms submitting their experiences. The 10 best ones were made into comedy webisodes. It was done with MSN.

Unilever launched it on 'Ellen Degeneres Show', then got it on 'The Tonight Show' and 'Entertainment Tonight'.

It had 4,000 submissions and 50,000 votes. Not bad and it's really quite funny as well.

Slootweg went onto say that digital agencies should focus on creative and not building stuff, which is why it built the motherhood site with MSN.

She admits Unilever is not good at creating the continuous flow of content because it is used to creating three-month campaigns and moving on, which is part of the reason for working with production companies and MSN for the likes of the Motherhood series.

Next up Duncan Edwards, chief executive of the National Magazine Company.

A broadcaster goes broadband

Questions for Henry:

12:00 - He says the ad world still has to come with ITV.com since ITV has decided that it is going down the free route where content is consumed free, but he says that all depends on the relation with advertisers.

And at the moment it is not happening. No clues as to how he is going to make this £150m.

He said the biggest challenge is how do you take 50 years of content and do something with it online.

Guardian reporter asks how are you going to update Friends Reunited. Henry says traffic is robust. It is not languishing he says.

He says he knows the challenge is to take FriendsReunited to the next generation. He won't say how, but it is well in hand. And it needs to be.

11:45 - Jeff Henry, director of ITV Consumer, shares the results so far, and the challenges ahead for ITV’s ambitious £20m online venture. The verdict has to be that there is much to do.

ITV has a long way to go. Henry says the broadcaster wants to be the leading provider of free entertainment in the UK.

ITV is looking to make £150m in online revenues. But it has a lot of questions to answer, such as quality of programming for one and what the hell is it going to do with Friends Reunited, which has been eclipsed and found left wanting by its newer and niftier social media rivals.

Free content is not enough. We're currently watching a video about a piece ITV did on Second Life. If it is looking to that Dodo then you can see the scale of the problem.

User Generated Content could be somewhere, however, ITV could really go.

Henry points to that quality piece of TV that has for so long been part of ITV's line-up - 'You've Been Framed', where viewers sent their videos in. Now we have 'Britain's Got Talent'. Yes it is awful, but people like it.

'Britain's Got Talent' clips were a hit on sites like YouTube, but ITV has to make money out of it. 30m views but real benefit. Why? Because all the content was on the video aggregator that is Google's YouTube.

He points to the launch of the new ITV.com site, which has seen traffic grow as it tries to find new ways to expand the site. F1 has been dynamite this year, mostly thanks to Brit wonder Lewis Hamilton. Interviews and fresh content has really driven traffic.

10:45 - Peter Bale, executive producer at MSN.co.uk. Bale (ex of the Times) is arguing that content is not cheap, that it is still valuable and has a big role to play in terms of aggregation.

At MSN, like Google, he is talking about working with publishers/content streams about helping them with revenue streams. Such as revenue sharing with video firms, which is still an area that no one knows how to monetise.

But with 60 content partners (soon to grow to 100) there is not a lot of cash to go around. Add in to that the UGC.

Amusingly, he admits to no longer being a Google lover.

He says that publishers needs to be very aware in what Google is going with news agencies that it is a publisher and a danger for the likes of The Times and the Guardian.

Cohen fires back that Google is an aggregator - just with a "different business model".

Waldman asks for a show of hands to ask whether publishers are better off with the aggregators. People are shy. But there is a slightly larger smattering of those who think we are better off.

It seems hard to call it any other way. At this point at least, but if Google continues its move into owning content and now sending users to content sites, then that could change.

10:30 - Duncan Dunlop, general manager, Oodle UK on the changing classified market. It's another aggregator.

Sees the lead base business as the future, but also has a dig at content publishes, which is Dunlop says is a business under threat.

Points to the US car market, which has recently flipped to go totally lead base.

10:15 - Meet the aggregators

A big part of the future. All about how to get your content out there. Joshua Cohen, business product manager, Google News is speaking. They don't want to own the content they just want you to have it – becoming the biggest aggregator along the way.

"So why should you (publishers) like us?"

He does answer the question people always ask. What kind of company is it? The definitive answer is a technology company that is also in the search and advertising business. So not strictly just a "technology" company.

Simon Waldman points out Google's move about it move into hosting content since it started hosting AP news (so really it is a publisher as well).

Cohen says it still about sending the users to publishers sites, but that the news wires have a different business model. He dodged the question basically and didn't answer why basically Google is now a publisher wanting to both court and compete with publishers, which could be a hard act to beat.

930 - First up has been Caroline Little, chief executive and publisher, Washington Post.

She has been talking a lot about the global and local issue about websites are both playing in small local markets and global ones where the Post in some respects goes up against UK sites like the Guardian.

Widgets not surprisingly has also been an issue. The Post has just run a competition asking for its staff to come up with Facebook widget ideas. They got more than 30. It could have been something to do with the iPhone on offer. The best were RSS ideas. Not surprising really as the Post is all about news.

Talking about the collaboration between the paper and the Washington Post sit, which still has a way to go. Part of that seems to be that the as an old media organisation it is still led by the values of the old media organisation that it is part of.