BBC 2.0 / AOL's bloggingstocks / Independent lags online / VH1's Digg-a-like: This week's PR Business column
BBC 2.0
With brilliant timing, just after last week's column's deadline passed the biggest online media news in the UK so far this year hit: the BBC's announcement that it would be re-designing its website, incorporating many features like social networking, more consumer generated content and on demand video. How far we've come in the past year: from low awareness of blogs and social media to our most important media institution re-building itself around the stuff.
The plan was quickly nicknamed BBC 2.0 by bloggers, because of the Beeb's unashamed adoption of Web 2.0 language and ambitions. The announcement met with violent praise and jubilant anger in equal measure. Most detractors were the usual suspects, commercial rivals who decry just about anything the BBC does as anticompetitive, while some key thinkers in the social media world grumbled about the BBC not going far enough. However, others welcomed the move as evidence of the BBC's commitment to remaining relevant to its audience, many of whom are now as likely to want to access BBC content, be it video, audio or text via the web as any other medium.
What is for sure is that the coporation's plans are likely to accelerate the uptake of new media in the UK, making it even more imperative that PRs know their blogs from their vlogs and their Wikis from their Flickrs if they are to keep up.
AOL launches a brace of stock market blogs
Financial PR in the UK has yet to be majorly impacted by new media, but that may be about to change. After Google included a blog-ticker on its financial markets service, AOL has launched bloggingstocks.com, a network of bloggers dedicated to covering news on key stocks and markets. Watch for the similar services in the UK, especially if a stable economy and a slow housing market push more private investors back into investing in equity.
Independent left behind online
Meanwhile, business editors from national newspapers debated the
impact of the web on thier businesses on the web at a Dow Jones
conference. According to a report in the Guardian, a great deal of
discussion focused on how to make money from business reporting online
(the upshot being they don't know).
Most agreed that there was demand for quality reporting on business, but that at the same time people expected their content for free, though price wars on newstands were blamed for this rather than what most bloggers will tell you: that no one links to articles that are on sites that subscription-only.
The consensus seemed to be that for now, print was still where the business of business reporting remains.
Jeremy Warner, City editor at the Independent, also admitted that the paper's web strategy has been unambitious so far. That's an understatement - the Guardian, Times and Telegraph's have all made serious strides forward with their websites while the Independent's innovations over the past couple of years have all been offline.
Digg dug by MTV channel
It was always certain that Digg, the technology news website whose community decides what makes the front page by voting for it, would inspire others to follow its example. Now VH1, a music TV channel, has done just that with its Best Ever Links service in the US. The site encourages people to post interesting links to other websites, as well as videos and pictures from their phones.
Immeidately showing the power of this kind of medium to allow everyone to sink to gutter-press standards, someone leaked the entire itenary for Tom Cruise's publicity tour of New York this week, complete with a handy interactive map.
How long until we get a Heat version of Digg in the UK? It must be in planning right now...
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