News and Events

Readers will pay for journalism but not online

Apparently a new report by YouGov Sixth Sense has found that Britons only consider quality journalism worth paying for in print. Not when it's online.

It's sure to raise interesting questions for publisher News International and its bullish chairman Rupert Murdoch, who today erected the first paywalls around the entire content of two UK news sites.

Make natural search easy for writers

At a Travelmole event about online content last night we had a big debate about what constitutes "good content". The one voice that wasn't heard during the debate was the voice of writers who I know are often frustrated by their hunt for good content online.

Online content - what's new?

I took part in an interesting Travelmole debate about online content tonight. Fellow panellist Giles Longhurst explained how Frommer's Unlimited creates relevant bespoke and syndicated content for different company websites - content not just to drive high traffic levels, but traffic with a low bounce rate to engage and deliver results.

5 Inspirational links

A client recently asked me to give them some ideas about what's happening online. Here's five things I picked.

Website paywalls - will all content be paid for eventually?

For months there have been rumours of a forthcoming online paywall at the Times, as preparations for times.co.uk and sundaytimes.co.uk got underway. Today it was announced that both of the new sites will charge £1 per day or £2 per week for readers to access content, from June onwards. That is not much compared to the cost of a daily paper, but with so much quality English-language news content on the web for free, it will be interesting to see how many readers are willing to pay. This is not the first paywall in the world, but it is quite possibly the largest and The Sun and the News of the World are both planning to follow suit.

Real time indexing - The next chapter for Google?

We hear on the SEO grapevine that there are talks at Google of introducing ‘real time indexing', if so, this is big news for the web, not to mention the world of online PR and social media.

Are we opinionated enough?

Travel trade media don't offer sufficient opinions and analysis of key issues according to a debate which has been running on the Travelrants website run by blogger Darren Cronian.

"Mind blowing" social media

It's mind blowing. According to statistics collected by the online gods at econsultancy ((http://tinyurl.com/yetgcru)) there are now 350 million active users on Facebook globally. That's a 40% increase compared to the 250 million who were merrily chatting away just six months ago

A summary of TravBlogCamp 2009

Twitter was the hot topic at last night's TravBlogCamp 2009, with the legal issues of running a blog and paid vs. free content also provoking heated debates. Arranged by Travel Rants' DarrenCronian and moderated by Tnooz's Kevin May, TravelBlogCamp 2009 was a lively event with bloggers, online editors, travel companies and PRs joining in the debate.

2010 Marketing? Think Differently

It's World Travel Market 2009 and this is a speech given at a Caribbean Tourism Organisation Event during the show