Odd Content: site of the week

The Guardian yesterday profiled this week's site of the week Lastminute Sermon, and thanks to Online Content UK member Rachel Murrell for the tip.

Created for the busy minister who may not be too confident in their sermon-writing abilities, Lastminute Sermon is run by professional writer and lay preacher Bob Austin.

"The sermons have all been pulpit tested, so they are congregation friendly", says Austin in the Guardian article.

The site offers a free sample for Palm Sunday, and other semons ranging from 'Paying taxes to Caesar' to 'The Transfiguration' cost a flat-fee of 8 GBP. State of Content predicts the enticingly-titled 'Jesus heals a leper' will be a top seller.

Content deal signed btween FT and MSNBC

MSNBC.com plans to expand its business news section and has added a content deal with UK financial newspaper the Financial Times to arrangements with the likes of BusinessWeek online and ZDNet.

DigitalBulletin reports that the FT will provide 15 news stories a day "from its international, global, equities and markets coverage".

MSNBC will also offer readers an easy link through to the FT's subscriptions page and it will be interesting to see if the FT.com's subscriptions jump significantly via this US promotion.

"Traditional media increasingly irrelevant" says war coverage article

In an opinion piece on US media coverage of the Iraq war at sfweekly.com, Matt Smith's headline claims "traditional media mislead the public about the war in Iraq as a media revolution makes traditional media increasingly irrelevant".

The article points to news websites he feels present a far more balanced view of the Iraq conflict than the mainstream US press, and notes that many US citizens now turn to European, UK or Middle Eastern online sources for more objective reporting.

Smith says:

"It's now clear that, by unquestioningly parroting Pentagon flackery, metropolitan daily newspapers, broadcast and cable television networks, and radio networks misled Americans into believing that the US Army last month entered an easily won battle from which the country could quickly extract itself. US news organizations have, indeed, used the war as an opportunity to distinguish themselves as toadying, superficial, jingoistic, simplistic, and, on too many points, drastically, factually, frequently wrong."

Update on Al-Jazeera - sending SMS news this week

The Arabic news website is still down this week and is sending out news via SMS, reports dotJournalism.

The text alerts are available to mobiles in over 130 countries and are published in both English and Arabic. Despite the downed site, demand for its news services is higher than ever with 'Al-Jazeera' replacing 'war' and 'sex' as the top search engine terms at Lycos last week.

Australian broadsheet The Age reports today that the English-language version of Al-Jazeera is back up, but as of 11.20am UK time the site still says 'service unavailable'.

'Second superpower' - a story of the impact of online content

In just 42 days the original meaning of 'second superpower", a phrase coined by New York Times journalist Patrick Tyler, has been changed.

In a thought-provoking and rather philosophical article at The Register, Andrew Orlowski describes how the powerful idea of a 'second superpower' - the uprising of protest against the current Iraq conflict by the public - has been tempered through different usage.

When Google links to blogs that have linked to an essay using the phrase in a rather different way than the original intention, the new meaning becomes the only easily accessible meaning - a 'Googlewash', claims Orlowski.

[Note: State of Content has been unable to find the original Patrick Tyler article via a search of the New York Times website.]

Guardian wins best online newspaper award

The Guardian Unlimited website has been awarded the top prize in the best daily online newspaper category at the annual Newspaper Awards beating commended sites Telegraph.co.uk and FT.com.

Winning for the fourth year in a row, the site was lauded by judges as "an excellent example" with "superb web-exclusive content". The most popular newspaper-owned site on the net, Guardian Unlimited hit the 100 million page impression level last month as a visitor boost brought on by the war in Iraq gave the site more than nine million readers over the month.

The win demonstrates that offering more than just recycled print copy really matters when it comes to creating the quality online content that readers expect, and keep returning for.

Formal assessment of web accessibility by rights group

The UK's Disability Rights Commission has announced their first formal investigation into the accessibility of 1000 websites in an effort to indentify persistent barriers to to web access for people with disabilities.

Websites analysed will be across the private and public sectors and the Commission hopes to help developers and creators avoid common accessibility problems via the research.

Chairman of the organisation Bert Massie announced the research project last week, noting how the internet has had a profound effect on many people's daily lives.

"It is vital that this new and powerful technology does not leave disabled people behind, but that its potential for delivering a genuinely inclusive society is realised to the full", he said.

The project's findings are expected by the end of 2003.

How much do government websites cost?

An article from eGov monitor reports on the costs of government websites after figures were released to parliament earlier this week.

At number one on the most expensive list was the Department for Education and Skills which came in at £1,747,000 during the last 12 months, and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs spent £326,000 on updating web content over the same period.

eGov monitor says that additional departments will release figures shortly including official web expenditure by the Home Office "which - as eGov monitor Weekly reported recently - has spent over £1.5 million on its 18 different websites since January last year", excluding costs of staffing and immigration and passports sites.

AOL to charge for lifestyle content

Starting today AOL Time Warner will no longer offer free online access for all to some of its lifestyle publications in an effort to support AOL. Only subscribers of the AOL ISP service will now be able to access People and Entertainment Weekly online, and magazines Real Simple and InStyle will soon follow suit.

In an article at SiliconValley.com, it's reported that AOL Time Warner is trying to attract new customers after industry analysts claimed they weren't doing enough to entice new subscribers after the ISP giant's customer figures dipped for the first time last quarter.

Covering the subject in E-Media Tidbits, Amy Gahran suggests that perhaps AOL's problems stem more from poor service to its ISP customers and a late uptake of broadband than a lack of content.

"AOL waited a little too long to take broadband seriously, and they may not recover from that mistake" she says.

Salon's not dead yet

Last Friday Salon announced they'd secured funds of US$800,000 in their latest round of financing from existing investors. Good news also from their subscription department - their paid subscriber base is currently over 60,000, up by more than 13,000 from the end of last year.

Early this year Salon launched an 'intercept advertising' feature, where readers could avoid paying a subscription by watching a short series of ads before accessing the site's content. The company has announced that 14 advertisers, including high-profile companies like American Express, have signed up to feature in their subscription-avoidance advertising plans.

CBS Marketwatch reports that Salon's total funding since July now totals US$2.1 million, giving the troubled online magazine the opportunity to keep publishing.

Media and the War - update

As the war in Iraq continues, so does the media's analysis of coverage.

MediaGuardian.co.uk
MediaGuardian has an excellent online resource in Iraq - the media war their special report on coverage of the conflict. As well as late breaking news on the war itself, the report offers a range of new and collated articles under sections ranging from 'spin and propaganda', to tributes to Terry Lloyd and Gaby Redo and an area on online media coverage.

Editor & Publisher
E&P reports that two US Newsday journalists may have been detained by the Iraq government according to Newsday's editor. In another article E&P reports that editors are now preparing their journalists for the long haul in Iraq, believing that the quick war promised by politicians will drag on.

mbites
The latest from mbites focuses on satellite news stationAl-Jazeera going offline. The denial-of-service attack was well-publicised, but several sources posit that there may be more to it.

europemedia.net
An article focuses on the new Iraq Body Count website created by a University of New Hampshire professor. Tallying estimated civilian deaths in Iraq, information is gathered from news reports and then fed into the counter.

Wired News
In an article today titled Hackers Condemn Arab Site Hack, Wired News reports that bona fide hackers are against any form of censorship and don't want to be accused of the attacks on Al-Jazeera and accuse the perpetrators of being bullies and hypocrites.

IWantMedia
A roundup of predominantly US sources of stories on war coverage from IWantMedia includes a section devoted to digital media reporting.

French ad campaign features dead journos

A French ad campaign depicts journalists as murder victims to highlight the importance of defending press freedom and remind the public that a journalist's job can be extremely dangerous. Though the ads started running in January, they are now especially topical during the current Iraq conflict where journalists have been killed and injured.

The ads, created by Saatchi & Saatchi for press freedom organisation Reporters Without Borders, show high-profile French journalists killed via gunshot or knife wounds and are quite confronting.

A report (including images of the ads) at AdAge.com, quotes Saatchi's worldwide creative director Bob Isherwood saying "I'm going to see if we can't run it globally. It's a very powerful idea. There's no reason we shouldn't be able to run it in the US with US journalists, and I'm sure people would do it."

In countries where traditional media are censored by governments, freedom to report accurately may only be available via clandestine online journalism. While this campaign is not specifically targeting online journalists, it's a powerful message to a section of the media often least fettered by government interests.