Friday October 27
It's my final day at nzherald and I'd like to say good bye.
There have been a lot of changes in online publishing and at nzherald since I joined the fledgling operation at the beginning of 2000.
Yet in many ways that early website offered a glimpse of what the web would become - once the business models had been sorted out.
The early
Herald Online
sought to bring readers into the news conversation, through daily polls and discussion boards, much like the current trend towards "social media" and "user-generated content".
And the site showed that the Herald could compete with radio and television to be among the first with the news, for example during our coverage of the Fiji coup, the 2000 America's Cup and Sept 11.
There was so much optimism in those dot-com bubble days that our business cards carried the slogan "Wilson & Horton Interactive - leaders of the webolution". As corny as that may sound, it does evoke the fun and creativity that were part of working in a web start-up.
Along the road there have been enormous changes, including retrenchment during the dot-com meltdown of 2000-2001 when many of our digital pioneers lost their jobs. But the website is now stronger and more effective than ever. Our team has grown substantially and the site is updated every few minutes. We offer audio and video when they help to explain a story. There are email alerts and RSS feeds on 2000 subjects.
Shortly after I started here, a very excited system administrator sent a note to the rest of us, announcing the nzherald stats for February 2000: over half a million users and almost two million page impressions for the month!
Six and half years later, the figures for September 2006 were three times higher for users (at more than 1.6 million per month), and 14 times higher for page impressions (at more than 27 million). On a typical day, more than 130,000 people stop by the site at least once.
The numbers are wonderful and we're really proud of them. They are testimony to the dedication of a magnificent online team, whom I am going to miss very much, and the support of our talented colleagues throughout the Herald.
But more than anything else, the success of nzherald reflects the suppport of "the people formerly known as the audience" (a phrase coined by Jay Rosen). The feedback and the opinions (many of which have appeared in our Readers' Views section) have helped us create the country's leading online news service and a place where the community meets to share information, expertise and opinion.
Long may it continue.
This will be the last entry in the
Editor's Desk
blog, but my musings continue at
. I hope you'll join me there.
- - - posted 12.30pm by Neil Sanderson
The stats are in
and here are the most-read stories on nzherald this week:
1.
2.
Invitation to a fling spreads like spam
3.
Star's son drops in but nobody home
4.
Infertility is only a phone call away
5.
Decision to sail in storm under review
- - - posted 12.20pm by Neil Sanderson
Can you hear it too?
For the past few days I've been wondering about a low frequency, and quite loud, vibration I've been hearing. Now it seems
, others in Auckland and Northland have been hearing it too.
Dr Tom Moir at Massey University reckons the "humming" is around 56Hz. Not everyone hears it, although that could be due to variations in our hearing abilities. At 56Hz, the sound is quite low pitched. For me, it's a bit like having one of those "thump thump" cars pull up beside you at the traffic lights - but more musical. ;{-)
Today in our
, we'd like to hear from anyone else who's been hearing the mystery humming.
It would be great if you could describe the sound, and indicate where you were (i.e. what suburb) when you heard it. Let's help the scientists track this down before it drives us nuts.
- - - posted 9.22am by Neil Sanderson
Thursday October 26
Now an update
on the item below...
- - - posted 3.05pm by Neil Sanderson
says Sir Anthony O'Reilly's Independent News & Media is aiming to take 100 per cent ownership of APN News & Media. APN owns nzherald.co.nz, the New Zealand Herald, and other media businesses in New Zealand and Australia. And INM owns 41 per cent of APN.
The
Australian
says:
INM is believed to have teamed up with private equity firms to bid for the outstanding shares in APN in a deal worth $3.8 billion. It is understood INM presented directors with a bid about $6.00 a share, a sharp premium to yesterday's $5.49 a share closing price.
The prices mentioned are Australian dollars.
- - - posted 11.20am by Neil Sanderson
Wednesday October 25
What is the purpose of newspaper blogs?
The question is posed in UK journalism lecturer Andrew Grant-Adamson's
accompanied by his tally of the number of blogs offered by each of the main British papers.
[ The
Times
leads the way with 40 although, as Grant-Adamson points out, this competition ought to be about quality, not quantity. ]
In the comments area, Neil McIntosh of the
Guardian
writes:
Hello Andrew - not sure *counting* blogs adds much understanding as to *why* newspapers run blogs, but at Guardian Unlimited we see them as a useful way to have a dialogue with readers, and do things with the way we tell stories that we could not otherwise do. It also gets our journalists used to writing in a different way; blogging is, for me, the first form of journalism born from the web.
Couldn't agree more.
McIntosh continues:
As for numbers - we have quite a lot of blogs… Comment is free is essentially an aggregator for more than 1000 blogs, although only around 700 are active at the moment. We're about to launch a lot more in a new subject area, although we always favour group blogs over individual blogs. As our rivals' efforts show, you quickly run into trouble if you insist that all blogs must be written by one individual.
- - - posted 5.04pm by Neil Sanderson
I'll admit that I do bang on
about the joys of
(did I mention that we have about 2000 of them for you to choose from here at nzherald?)
But blogger Steve Rubel puts me to shame with his suggestions for pimping your house to include
.
The RSS-enabled toilet paper is a joke. I think.
- - - posted 9.28am by Neil Sanderson
Tuesday October 24
Hope all our NZ readers had a great holiday weekend, depsite the rain and wind. Time to check the email box after a 3-day break...
Reader comment:
Hi Neil, Haven't you guys got around to the whole global warming, climate change thing? Your website is great but you need a ENVIROMENT header in your reader services that goes straight to world environment issues. This is the fastest growing news area and the most import issue in the world, and will be for the next couple of hundred years. Please get onboard I am growing tired of your site because it is diffult to search for the No. 1 in news - "CLIMATE CHANGE"
- - - posted 12.26pm Oct 23 by Noel (x patriot)
Response:
Hi Noel, sorry you haven't had much luck finding our coverage of these important issues. Here are some tips:
Our
Conservation & Environment
category is a good place to start. You can get to it using the shortcut
which you might like to bookmark. We'll also send you all the stories in this category - instantly and at no cost - via
. Just copy this address into your RSS reader:
http://syndication.apn.co.nz/rss/nzhrsscid_000000039.xml
We also have a category for
Climate Change
. Try the shortcut
. The RSS feed is:
http://syndication.apn.co.nz/rss/nzhrsscid_000000026.xml
If you browse through our
, you'll find areas of the site (all with associated RSS feeds) for
Science
,
Pollution
,
Recycling
,
Energy
,
Biosecurity
and dozens of other subjects associated with the Environment.
- - - posted 9.48am by Neil Sanderson
The first-time mum began spotting a few days later and her baby was stillborn.