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James Goffin

5 months ago

in Publisher condemns 'deeply flawed' web traffic ruling - Press Gazette on Press Gazette
Sadly it's not just as simple as IP matches - because there aren't enough IP addresses to go round they are frequently shared between multiple users, either within large organisations or by internet providers.
So you then start supplementing that with cookies to try to overcome the limitation, but first and third party cookies potentially given different results.
You then start considering that the number of PCs accessing your site isn't always the same as the number of people because they might use separate home and work PCs for example, or many people might share the same PC.
Website stats give a false impression of being incredibly accurate when there are really lots of compromises built in.
The key is establishing a common way of recording so at least the basis of comparison across sites is reliable, even if the raw figures are flawed.

6 months ago

in ‘the’ Observer brought down to size by Guardian group’s new integrated style guide on Press Gazette
Er, yes as The Times' style guide points out: "PIN (not Pin), personal identification number. Do not write PIN number, which is a tautology "
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/tools_and_serv...

6 months ago

in ‘the’ Observer brought down to size by Guardian group’s new integrated style guide on Press Gazette
I'd hazard a guess that it was previously "PIN number" as it's an acronym derived from Personal Indentification Number.

7 months ago

in WI campaigns against local paper sex ads - Press Gazette on Press Gazette
Last year Hampshire WI voted to support the legalisation of prostitution, so it seems a bit sweeping to claim mass support for this from the WI.
And this from the National Federation of Women's Institutes website: "The NFWI does not have any resolutions on the ethics, legalisation, decriminalisation or criminalisation of prostitution, and therefore does not have any policy, campaigns or position on the issue. The NFWI is unable to comment on issues on which it does not have a resolution."

8 months ago

in Care in the community on Press Gazette
"P2 - We are then told ‘fewer than one in five voters were happy with Brown’s premiership’. That means none."
No it doesn't. It could be one in six voters or one in ten - it's crassly expressed, but the inference is wrong.

9 months ago

in Which CMS do they use in online journalism utopia? on Martin Stabe
It's not just the fault of the CMS. There's a fundamental difference in the way you handle information to do all the sparkly stuff that is alien to knocking out a piece of text.
To do a football league table as plain text you can just type it, bung in few tabs and you're done. To make that interactive you need a database table for the teams, for each result, some script to work out the points and generate the table.
Open that up to a big competition like the FA Cup and you need an index that includes every club in the country. Or you could just type the text in, bung in a few tabs...
Journalists are used to working with words and not data; they are two different disciplines that have a lot to offer each other, but different nonetheless.
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Martin Stabe's picture
Martin Stabe Absolutely right.

But wouldn't you agree that most newsroom CMSs are designed specifically to do the sort of "knock out a piece of text" journalism and actually discourage the sort of mind shift towards data-driven work you describe?

To build your database-driven football tables, for example, a technically knowledgeable journalist like yourself will most likely have to step outside the constraints of the system used by the to build it from scratch.

The output from that application would then probably be piped back into the general framework that runs the paper's site with some ugly hack involving Javascript or iframes. That's an example of the creative workarounds I was talking about.

The best website editors are those who can achieve this sort of stuff in spite of whatever systems are at their disposal.

11 months ago

in East London Advertiser secures online Downing Street petition - Press Gazette on Press Gazette
Good work by our Archant colleagues, but the East Anglian Daily Times had a petition on the 10 Downing Street site back in January in support of our campaign to keep open Post Offices in Suffolk and Essex.
Not sure if we were the first...

1 year ago

in Who’s using Dreamweaver then? on Press Gazette
Dreamweaver doesn't stop you writing HTML by hand - you can always dive in to the source code directly - but it does make some tedious jobs easier. I know table tags have got a bad name thanks to the rise of CSS, but it's much easier to sort a table visually using something like DW than it is to track through all the tags by hand.
Some bits of DW like it's templating can also be useful for ensuring consistency across pages and stopping people breaking stuff by accident.
As for teaching "basic CMS use" what exactly does that mean? Most sites use their own custom content management systems.

1 year ago

in The plural of anecdote is not data — even when it’s ‘crowdsourced’ on Martin Stabe
Plus ça change...
There are new things happening in online journalism but calling tip offs from readers 'crowdsourcing' doesn't give them any more inherent value.
The speed and scale of the interaction may have changed, but the basic mechanic is still the same.
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